the island of lost pacing

[dragonlady7]

Of late my Macbook has been spontaneously deciding that although the thingy in the top bar that keeps track of the battery life still says 33%, my computer is just going to shut down without even popping up the notice it used to ("Your battery is nearly exhausted and the computer will go to sleep in point three seconds unless you plug it in" or somesuch). I have a terrible habit, especially when I am doodling and not yet sure how I am going to next proceed, of just opening new documents, writing things into them, and then not saving and leaving it there for days until I finally have the mental focus to come back, decide where I was going with the thing, and then save it.
So of course the bloody thing did it again last night. And what's more annoying, Firefox had done one of those things where it invisibly installs an update, and so when it starts back up, instead of saying "a bunch of tabs closed unexpectedly, shall I restore the session?" it just says "Yay you have a new Firefox!"
So I lost several days' worth of assorted tabs I had been planning on investigating further or responding to. Some of them were comments I was going to reply to. Etcetera.

I'm kind of making a catalogue now of word-processing documents that I'm pretty sure I lost unsaved, and cannot retrieve so much as a trace of. I am less devastated by this than I might be, because I know for a fact that none of them were any good; I am writing again, finally, but I am not writing *well*. All of them were the several hundred words of establishing the scene that I always write and have to later delete, but I can't get to the good bits without going through them first.

I am having terrible trouble, incidentally, in everything I write: Pacing. I can't do it. I do not know when to pull away and skip to the next scene. I feel like I have to stay close to the action all the time. There's no editing, there's no cutting to a different camera angle. I somehow have no idea how the hell to go from close in to far out, pacing-wise.
And the worst part is, I don't actually think I've ever been at all able to do this. How have I gotten as far as I have for as long as I have without ever having the slightest idea how to pace something?

So if anyone has any ideas on how to improve that, I'm all ears. (And all 300,000-word manuscripts.)

Anyhow: what I lost.
1) a nebulous post in need of editing anyway, for either the LJ or Wordpress blogs (I have a Wordpress blog, I'm just not that good at it)
2) a continuation of the "next bit of section II" for the Barbarians_novel, in which Marcus was going on about politics and I was trying to work up to the introduction of the character Aulus but didn't know how, so Marcus was just lecturing some more. I know, boring. I don't remember if Callonia had anything worth saying, though.
3) a complete redoing of Chapter 6, which was the place where the chronological rewrite had totally stalled out. Again, pacing. I knew I had to introduce Aleite, Lita, and Golovis, and was doing so via about five thousand words of boring domestic life, bringing the story's momentum to a screeching halt and meaning that an important confrontation was just being postponed indefinitely and I didn't know what the main POV character was supposed to feel about that. OK, I only had about 300 words of this done so far, and again, I was working up to something worthwhile happening...
4) a list of criteria needed for the roller derby league's interleague bouting policy
5) firefox tabs: cupcake recipes, frosting recipes, a fascinating essay on gender relations (and the phenomenon of men being know-it-alls), that tyellas had linked to, and then a whole bunch of derby-related tabs I'll never remember. And i don't remember what else there was either. I'm terrible at this.

In other news, I have now lost my train of thought. It is time to get off my ass and start my day.

Comments

[ithilwen.livejournal.com]

How long have you had your Macbook? If you've had it for a year or so, and you often work off the battery rather than plugging into the wall, it probably just means your battery needs to be replaced. That's how the original battery in my iBook started to behave when it reached the end of its life. One minute my laptop was up and running, then next minute WHAM! it shut down without any warning. I replaced the battery and the problem went away. Even under the best conditions, lithium ion batteries only last for about three years before they are shot. (That happens even if you're not using them, which means you can't even stockpile the things for future use.)