Monday 16 February 2009

Writer's Nightmare - Celtx? Are you out there?

There are few things that freeze the blood more than staring at a
screen, willing the errant pixels to appear as your stomach makes a
greasy slide down into the abyss and a mixture of bile and blind panic
rises in the throat.

Yes, at approx 5.40pm yesterday I lost a week's work. Not just any
week, but the most productive and satisfying 4 days work in over a year.

Scene 12 - 42. Gone. And apparently - despite CELTX's claim to be saving
my file every 5 minutes, and at least 3 manual saves and reboots in that
3 days - no retrievable copy.

Now, luckily, completely fortuitously 5 minutes earlier I had done a
word count, by copypasten in word.
Because when I hit the next 1000 words I had promised myself a biscuit.

So I had the whole raw text sitting in an unsaved open document.

But - what the hell CELTX? Guess whose software I will not be trusting
again?
How come you saved all my new characters names in the Master Catalogue,
all the new scene locations etc - but not the effing script itself?
Huh?

Back to Final Draft.

It will take *hours* to rebuild that sodding script.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh Tanya, I feel for you. At least it wasn't lost completely. Don't let this set you back. Keep going.
JJ

Tanya said...

Thanks JJ - knew you would understand the "ouch" factor.