Why I Save Everything...

I've been working on tweaking a manuscript for submission, one I wrote quite some time ago that I've rewritten a couple of times since. When I hit a very important scene near the beginning of the story (the hero and heroine's "first time"), I realized it really wasn't working. The dynamic of the scene was totally wrong, and didn't fit the message I was trying to get across.

Faced with having to rewrite the whole scene, I started dithering. Then it occurred to me that, in an earlier draft, I had taken a completely different approach, one that I thought would fit much better with my new ideas of the story. Lo and behold, there was my earlier draft, saved from a desktop that's no longer with us, transferred to a laptop that I'm not using too much anymore, in a folder sitting on my external server where I'd backed everything up. One quick FTP from the server to my Mac, and I've got that old draft in Scrivener where I can cannibalize it.

Sometimes it's good to be a packrat...