23 April 2017

This was me on Facebook yesterday, having a meltdown:

I had just finished combing the manuscript for those last, buggery, infuriating typos, and was DONE. Finally. The sucker was ready to be formatted, and I was preparing to send the final draft to the editor. the Spouse Thingy has a week off work starting Monday, and I was primed to take a few days off as well. Perfect timing.

But then I started the email to which I would attach the file, and realized there were 3 versions of the book sitting in my Dropbox folder.

And then, to my horror, I realized I had been working from all three at different points, all because I often have a case of Teh DumB. Every day I'd sit down and open Word, click on the file name in the main page, and work. Like a normal person, right?

Eh. The mistake was all on me. I wanted to blame Word for saving different files, and I wanted to blame Dropbox, because why the hell not, but looking at it, it was me.

It looks like this. Wait for this.

When you save a file to Dropbox, it saves to your hard drive first. Then it synchs to Dropbox. I know that.

But I was not paying attention the 2,974,984 times I clicked on SAVE while working. So a lot of the time when I worked at Starbucks, I clicked on SAVE, watched as Word saved the file, and then closed the lid to the laptop.

Here's the thing, boys and girls, learn from me: there's a little Dropbox icon in the Windows taskbar. DON'T SHUT THINGS DOWN UNTIL YOU SEE THAT LITTLE GREEN CIRCLE WITH THE CHECKMARK. If you don't see that, if it's a little blue circle with roundy arrows, it's still synching.

I wasn't paying attention. So Dropbox patiently waited for me to be near a WiFi connection again with the freaking lid open, and then saved the document with a new file name.

So I screwed up. And whined. And in whining got great advice and learned how to compare documents with Word. Well, two documents, and I needed to compare three. But the upside is that I learned how to do it, and in poking around realized I could do two at a time and then worry about the third later.

And HALLELUJAH, when I sat down to get it done, I realized the only differences occur in the first 40 pages. After that, other than a few stray commas, all three documents are the same.

So what I thought was going to take 3-4 days only took 2-3 hours.

I'm still taking one more pass through, just in case, so I won't be sending it to the editor until Monday, but...for all intents and purposes, FORKED is done.