I’d been writing the book in Google Docs for months, but it was starting to make my computer slow.
Then my editor reminded me that I was going to have to submit the manuscript in Microsoft Word. Fiiiiiine — I’ll move it over to Word.
I hit a groove. Three chapters in three weeks and two of those chapters were a struggle to write. 20 minutes into a writing session, I didn’t notice that the power on my Mac was low. It died mid-sentence. I plugged it in and headed out to get the kid.
I opened my computer when I got home. It looked ominous.
The three chapters that I wrote in Word were gone. I was staring at the document I uploaded three weeks earlier. Shit.
I tried to recover the doc, but I fucked up the auto-recovery. I was so pissed. Then I was sad. I may have cried. I scooped up what I could and moved everything back over to Google.
Leading up to this, I’d been saving every new, significantly different draft as Working Title V1, Working Title V2, etc. This would’ve been Working Title V5.
This time though, when I saved the draft, I named it This Better Work.
I spent two weeks writing in that doc before it dawned on me. Wait, is this the title of the book?
This Better Work.
Every founder has uttered these words at least a million times.
Today, I printed the manuscript with that title on the cover. Having a title, and holding a printed manuscript IN MY HANDS, makes the end feel closer than it did yesterday.
This wasn’t the way I wanted to get to the title of my book, but I’ll take.
And yes, I now have backups of the book saved in multiple places at all times now. Lesson learned.