959 .rtf Files on the wall…
C.E. Grundler
959 .rtf Files on the wall.
Take one down, pass it around,
958 .rtf Files on the wall.
Ever play ’Fifty Two Pickup’? It’s a game older children love to play with their younger siblings, though it’s not so much a game as a practical joke. “Wanna play Fifty Two Pickup?” seems innocent enough, if you don’t know what awaits. But as soon as the guileless mark agrees, the Dealer gleefully tosses the entire deck into the air and says, “Now you pick it all up.”
That’s the game I’ve been playing for the last two days, only instead of 52 playing cards, I’m faced with 959 .rtf files, .txt files, and even a few .pdf files for good measure. All because, it seems, Scrivener doesn’t want to play nice on my computer. I’d finally made the jump over to this lovely program – and it is lovely, at least when it is working the way it was intended. This is a program that was designed for and seems quite happy on Apple products, which is not where I’m running it. And every time I run into another hiccup, I find myself spending more time trouble-shooting than writing, and wondering if the next snafu might be catastrophic. It’s a wonderful program, brilliantly designed for writers, though I’ve discovered I’m not alone in my Windows related woes. And the other day, when Scrivener refused to load my project, or restore from my redundant backups or even backups from days and weeks ago, I took it as a sign to return to my less writer-friendly but more reliable system of Excel outlines and Word files. It was that or empty my wallet on an Apple laptop, then face the learning curve a new computer and OS would require.
Which brings me to damage control. You see, on the surface, Scrivener allows you to work it the most wonderfully non-linear way, due to the way it links files. Under the hood, that works by saving the text in a baffling array of cryptic files. And when Scrivener refuses to load or open a project, all is not lost. No. Every word of text is still there, safe and sound within those files – in no particular order. Just unzip the main backup, then click down until you find the Documents folder, and brace yourself. Some folders contain complete chapters, others, a passage, paragraph, sentence, even a lone word. Oh, and the full Scrivener tutorial is mixed in, just to bulk it out a bit more, along with every deleted document that had been lingering in the trash. 959 files. Open each file, one by one. Inspect contents, then rename it and move it to the folder where all the other scrambled snippets wait for their friends.
From all I could learn, the Windows version lacks certain functions, and I have no doubt my experience would have been different had I been working on the Apple side. I will admit, I’ll miss Scrivener’s intuitive operation, though I’ll also admit there were certain ways I used my Word/Excel combination that Scrivener wasn’t giving me. I’ll keep my eye on Scrivener and see what updates come for the Windows version. And down the road, perhaps it’s time to consider an Apple. But as for now, I just want to get these files sorted out, and get back to writing.
As of this morning, 397 files down, 562 to go.
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