Category Archives: writing

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Scum and Villainy
David Brin
Corry L. Lee
Pierce Ludke
Shoshanna
Robin Hobb
  • Favorite Villains
    • David: Alan Rickman in Die Hard. Pattern: you can give the villain a speech, and he can be fascinating and rationalizing. You can’t give the hero a speech, because it’s alienating.
    • Corry: Dr. Horrible. Sympathetic villain. He wants something.
    • Pierce: Dracula. The Joker. 
    • Shoshanna: Villain as central character. Richard the 3rd. Frankenstein’s Monster.
      • Richard the 3rd: He’s likable and charismatic, but he’s horrible.
    • Robin: Moriarity. Snape. Snape is more interesting than Dumbledore. And sympathetic.
      • Villains are victims of their circumstances.
  • The villain is never the villain in their own story.
  • Tolkien: the elves could be seen as the villains. The victors get to write the propaganda. Soroman could just be viewed as an industrialist who wanted to raise up the proletariat. 
  • Brin: The ability of villains to rationalize. As a writer, you can make the rationalizations almost tempting to reader and to the hero. 
  • Corry; The ends justify the means archetype. As a reader, we can believe that.
  • The villain has less rules guiding their behavior, compared to the hero.
    • We as readers also have rules that govern our behavior, and we like to experience freedom by living vicariously through the villain, who experiences more freedom.
  • Robin: 
    • The Heros, Joe Abercrombie. You see two sides of a two day war. By the end you don’t know who you are going to root for, and no matter which way it goes, it is going to be tragic.
    • Prince of Thorns: does unspeakable things to win, but you come to see his point of view.
  • Book by Anne Pratchette about terrorists who lock japanese businessman in a room, and by the end you are rooting for the terrorists.
  • calling the paid protectors (e.g. 911)
    • the hero doesn’t think to call them
    • the hero calls them but they don’t come
    • they come but they are incompetent
    • they come and their competent, but they are in cahoots with the villain
      • or the villain has framed you
    • and it scales with the threat: in the movie independence day, the entire united states citizens, the u.s. military and police force are all good and all competent, because the threat is so large.
    • the villainy is on a sliding scale, along with the competency of the paid protectors.
      • the villain can ensure the protectors don’t show up.
  • all that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing
  • flowers for algernon: there isn’t a villain. it’s the circumstances. fate is the villain.
  • yellow wallpaper

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The State of Print on Demand Publishing
iMage
Patrick Swenson
Muffy Morrigan
M. Todd Gallowglass
Duane Wilkins
  • Even traditional publishers going to print on demand
  • The Oxford Dictionary is going to POD
  • POD: books never go out of print, so your backlist generate value.
  • You have the ability to quickly fix errors that are found.
  • Two major groups: Lightning Source (Ingrim) vs Createspace (Amazon)
  • They differ in whether they charge for changes. It costs you to make changes for Lightning Source.
  • ISBNs
    • If you take a POD-house ISBN, the publisher shows up as Createspace.
    • If you do your own ISBN, you can be the publisher.
    • Each edition needs its own ISBN: e.g. mass market paperback vs. trade paperback.
  • Pagecount and trim size affect cost of book
  • deviant art: 
    • hundreds of artists
    • easy way to find independent artists for doing cover art.
    • (make sure you have permission for any models/buildings/etc that are visible.)
  • iStockPhoto
    • reasons photos and art, royalty free
    • if you find an artist you like there, go to their website, because they may have other work not on iStockPhoto.
  • Be aware there are commercial and private fonts: you need to make sure you have the correct rights for commercial use.
  • Some cover artists do the entire cover including titles, etc, some only do the art.
  • Publisher’s Weekly, Library Journal. Need 3-4 month lead time for ARCs to get reviews.
  • Your cover art should look good even icon sized: because most people are shopping online. 
  • Some small presses will still allow you to keep your e-book rights. If so, it’s a great deal, because you can sell a kindle book and keep 70%. 
  • Q: 
    • I’m self-publishing, trade paperback, and I want to keep the price under $10. So I have a pretty slim POD margin, less than my kindle version. And it’s worse even it it’s sold through a bookstore other than Amazon: then I get about 5 cents.
    • Any tips on how to get the cost down, or conversely, is there a cross-over point at which it makes sense to do a limited print run to get the cost down?

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Whining versus angst
Corry L. Lee, Alma Alexander, Elizabeth Guizetti, Stephanie Weippert, Anna Sheehan
  • Why do characters come from?
    • sometimes they leap out
    • characters take quite a bit of work. 
    • given the plot of my book, what’s a character that’s going to be interesting if they go through a change that mirrors the plot of the book?
  • If you have a character that says “here I am”, and then you have to write a story, what do you do?
    • Elizabeth: I need to start with a plot, their occupation, and their gender. once I have that, the rest jumps out. I’ve very plot driven, not character driven.
    • Alma: I wrote down character sketches (~5 lines) for nine different characters, then started writing. No idea of what the plot is.
    • Stephanie: I start with a starting scene. I imagine a woman driving in a stormy night. Then ask, why is she doing that? And it turns out she’s lost her job, and her boyfriend, and her apartment complex is being torn down. 
  • If you have a character where everything is going wrong, how do you keep them from being whiny?
    • Anna: I have a very passive character, who is that way because of emotional abuse. The trick to get away with it is to make it an unreliable first-person narrator. 
    • Stephanie: 
      • anger to overcome whiny
    • Alma: 
    • Elizabeth: Most of the characters I write about have real problems. If they whine a little bit, the reader understands that’s acceptable. But I also go to action: the character does something.
    • Corry: If you have somebody who is cycling on something in their past, they can’t just loop on the same thing, and say the same thing: e.g. “i lost my job. it sucks that I lost my job. i can’t believe i lost my job.” it’s time to progress: “oh, maybe i lost my job because i came to work with a mohawk.” or go into action.
  • What about action characters? If you have a really active characters, how does that balance out? (e.g. how do you write a two-dimensional action here?)
    • Elizabeth: they have to have real problems. they need to have personalities, likes and dislikes, friends. This rounds them out.
    • Anna: Has a character who is wildly angry, whose impulse is always to hit first. But need to keep him from being one dimensional. So he fights this anger. It has a background: he was institutionalized as a child. And it causes him problems.
    • Corry: Their personality needs to build with the world and intensify the story. Otherwise it is just tacked on.
  • Questions
    • What about secondary characters?
      • Corry: 
        • I like to look at the main characters. These are aspects of my main characters. Now how can I flip that aspect, and give it to a secondary character. Now each character and the aspects itself is more interesting.
        • Too often secondary characters are just milk-toast. They’re not interesting enough, or not weird enough. 
      • Elizabeth: Every secondary character has to fulfill a purpose, and if they aren’t fulfilling enough purposes, then combine secondary characters into one: makes them more interesting, fulfill more purposes, and have less names to remember.
      • Corry: Your secondary characters should want and need things, just as your primary character does. And if what they want is at odds with the primary character, all the better.
  • How do you demonstrate characterization?
    • Elizabeth: generally a quiet scene, something that furthers the plot, but something they do uniquely: e.g. the thief character who washes their laundry by hand and hangs it inside so it won’t be stolen.
    • Stephanie: Let the character make their own choices: big things: what are they going to choose if they can only save one of two things. little things: what music they listen to.
    • Anna: I do a lot of dialogue, and focus on the off the wall.
    • Corry: Action. Have your character doing something. The choice of what they do, and how they do it tells us a lot. Washing the blood out of the laundry is very different from someone doesn’t wash the blood out.
  • Q: What if you want to push your character over the edge and shatter them?
    • Do your research and make sure what kind of crazy it is.
    • You can’t go back.
    • Editors might not like it.
    • The character is changed permanently.
    • But they should be put together in a way that is functional.

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Line Editing vs. Copy Editing
S.A. Bolich
Muffy Morrigan
iMage
Carole Parker
Mike Shepard Moscoe
  • In general, money goes to the author, not from the author.
  • But if you are indie published, you are the publisher. Then there are expenses, including editing.
  • Line editing
    • grammar errors, 
  • Story editing
    • plot holes, characters acting out of character.
  • Story editing can improve a book, not just fix errors.
  • Suggested rewrites… sometimes writers don’t make the exact change, but get what the error is, and address it another way.
  • One of the drawbacks of indie publishing is that not everyone has an editor.
  • If you’re going to do an independent publication, you still have to treat it as a traditional house would. You need a story editor, you need a line editor.
  • “This is a great story. Can you rewrite it from third person POV?”
    • Seemed like crazy feedback. But I did it. 
    • It became so much more powerful. Better story, grew wordcount to appropriate length.
  • Muffy: 
    • Have an amazing editor. Every suggestion she’s ever made has made the book better.
    • Have done both line editing and story editing.
    • story editing should check continuity (facts remain constant in the book, e.g. dead in scene 3 is still dead in scene 9) and historical/world accuracy.
  • “It only needs a light edit” –> it’s never true.
  • “fix it” –> the key words for story editing
    • sometimes it only takes two sentences to fix a major story element. can change “out of character” to “in character”.
    • the key is to tell a writer that something needs fixing, not how to fix it.
  • you want your first readers to give you this kind of feedback.
  • Q: How do you find an editor?
    • First, do the best you can with a writing group, or by reading Strunk & White, by using first readers — to get it in the best shape possible. Otherwise you can spend a fortune on your editor.
    • Second, editors should give you references and have credentials. Anyone can call themselves an editor.
    • Third, go to cons, and take note of the names of panelists. 
  • As writers, we all have a tick. using the word “just” or “a little”. editors will come back and say “you need to remove 75% of ‘justs’”. this is good feedback.
  • When you’re shopping around for an editor, you need to ask what they read and work in. You need to find someone literate with your genre.
  • Have more than one first reader, and do them serially:
    • first one reads for story edits.
    • later ones receive the fixed version, confirming that story edits worked and now nit-picking.

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Building Cultures
Ted Butlet
Robin Hobb
Rhiannon Held
Frances Pauli
S.A. Bolich
  • When you are creating a culture (or recreating a historical one), if things differ, you need to spend time educating the reader: and you have to pick and choose what you spend that time,
    • e.g. historically women wore these incredibly tall french wigs that we would consider ridiculous looking. if you want to make that work, you have to show people flirting with that women, so the audience understands it is attractive. but is that worth it, or do you pick something else to spend the energy on?
    • e.g. werewolves heal really quickly, so a werewolf culture might be prone to fighting/tussling. a reader might perceive that as extremely violent. so you can choose to tone down the violence or educate the reader. 
  • cultures don’t stay static. how far back do you go to understand the culture?
  • you don’t want to dump all the culture on the reader. the writer needs to understand it.
  • we bring all of our cultural assumptions with us when we read. “it’s beneficial to be faithful.” can we write a culture that doesn’t have that?
  • avoiding infodumps
    • Ted Butler:
      • assume intelligence on the part of the reader
      • do it implicitly.
      • if something needs to be explicit, bracket it with action scenes.
    • Robin Hodd
      • book was in 1st person
      • but needed to convey information that the first character wouldn’t have known or have naturally shared.
      • so each chapter started with a letter or a news article or something.
      • also, in our culture, we teach our children through nursery rhymes and sayings. we can use this in writing.
    • Rhiannon Held
      • it comes up in problem solving scenes. who gets to speak, who has to argue for their ideas vs. whose are just accepted. who doesn’t get a voice.
  • you can create cultures based on earth cultures:
    • the wolf cultures are based not so much on wolves, but on hunter-gatherer societies, and how they achieve status within their culture.
    • spaceship cultures can be based on sailing ship cultures… a closed ecosystem, long time enclosed, etc.
    • or weird cultures: 
      • eskimo: elderly walking out into the cold to free up community resources. 
      • baby boxes: for abandoning children
(Buy Silver by Rhiannon Held: werewolves in urban setting, how they fit into human culture)

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I was lucky enough to see Melissa Hart speak at Willamette Writers‘s monthly meeting. Here are my notes from the meeting. (Melissa’s a fast speaker, so my notes are spotty, but still worthwhile.) I felt like I learned a ton of useful information even though I currently write fiction.

Melissa Hart
Writing Memoirs
  • “I got started at age 16 writing bad cat poetry. Would you like to hear some?”
  • The Assault of Laughter
  • Gringa
    • In 1979, my mother came out as a lesbian, and (as was common at the time) lost custody of her children as a result.
  • Short memoir in magazines: love this genre.
  • Contrary to what lots of people are saying, memoir is not dying: People want to read about other people’s lives. 
  • Ariel Gore: “A memoir is to journalistic autobiography as a movie based on real-life events is to a documentary”.
  • Memoir has narrative arc: rising action, climax, falling actions.
  • Form: Essay, social or political commentary, slice of life vignettes (look up Orion magazine Brian Doyle: amazing page long memoir that will knock your socks off).
  • It must teach us something. Offer the reader a gift. Examples:
    • 21st century foraging: giving us adventure tales of learning to eat what is outside our house.
    • another way the river has: the gift of traveling down the columbia river in a handmade boat.
    • growing up rich
    • growing up in poverty
    • relationship to candy
  • “90% of the submissions he receives are too personal. it’s too bad your grandmother died, but what are you going to tell the thousands of readers who grandmother’s die every day?” you need to teach the reader something.
  • you must tell readers how to think about a given subject. 
  • a.j. jacobs: immersion journalism. 
    • “my year of living bibically.”
      • his year of living literally as close as possible to the bible
  • natalie goldberg: wrote: old friend from far away.
    • memoir doesn’t have to be a “one time” thing. you can write about your relationship to coffee, or to the men in your life.
  • you don’t have to be old to write a memoir. you have what you need by the time you’re 12.
  • example:
    • candy freak
    • one man’s owl: biologist writes about an owl he adopted that 
  • exercises to do:
    • what’s one thing that makes you unique: (my teen years were something like Lindsay Weir: a mix of math team and stoners.)
    • what’s one thing about which you are passionate about: (freedom to pursue my dreams.) 
  • a glut of memoir right now about: cancer, alzhemiers, moms dying.
  • surprise is what grabs an editor. fill your writing with surprise, whether it is long, short, or just the query letter. 
  • memoir must start in the midst of conflict. you can always flashback. or you can ignore the past.
    • first page, first paragraph, first sentence
  • setting: you must tell us about the session, the tree that fell on the roof, the dust on the wall.
  • the cure for depression: immerse yourself in the sensory details of the present moment: what do I see, what do I smell, what do I feel, what do I hear?
  • this must be in your writing. 
    • make a table with five columns, one for each sense, and one row for each chapter.
    • make sure that each chapter engages every sense of the reader.
  • fun, fun, fun: you must have characters and dialogue.
    • don’t make people up.
    • but you create the people: your mom, your dog, your friend.
    • what are these people like? what is their body language like? what is their way of speaking? what do they do when they get nervous? how do they dress? (this stuff all engages the reader, and it’s fun.)
    • “what my hair style means to me.”
  • dialogue
    • no one wants to read 300 pages of narration.
    • but you can’t remember what your uncle said 40 years ago before he went to vietnam.
    • you have to have dialogue.
    • the dialogue has to be true to the person, as much as possible.
    • dialogue reveals character. and it’s important for moments of revelation.
  • surprise
    • do the following exercise: what’s one surprising thing about your life: (I blew up a car.)
  • give us scenes / anecdotes.
    • give us scenes with character, dialogues, and setting.
    • but it can’t just be scene after scene: then you might as well write fiction.
    • the reflection is what makes it a memoir.
    • and we need theme
      • the theme is usually:
        • my family is crazy and i survived
        • my dog is crazy and i survived
        • sickness is crazy and i survived
      • the theme must be throughout the work
  • simile and metaphor is OK
  • but hyperbole: a little is OK if you are writing humor.
  • there should be narrative arc on every page, in every chapter, and for the book as a whole.
  • writing process
    • free writing
    • shitty first draft (annie lamott)
    • make yourself uncomfortable: wear a too tight dress, and write until your piece is done, being desperate to take it off.
  • after you’ve finished your rough draft, ask yourself:
    • what’s at stake for my narrator and other characters?
    • where is the victim in my work and how can i delete?
      • (no one wants to read about victims. we want to read about empowered people.)
  • how do you get published?
    • for short length: look for submission guidelines. read them. they are what the publisher likes. and exactly how they want you to submit (hardcopy, electronic, etc.)
    • for book length: pitch at writing conference. it could be portland, or you could go anywhere in the world.
    • sha.com: 
    • most editors and agents want to see the full manuscript.
    • look for interview on website about self-publishing
  • questions
    • what are the legal ramifications about writing about living people?
      • they should not be able to be identified. change names, regional information, etc.
      • volunteered from audience “give the character a small penis” – they’ll never own up to it.
    • but won’t your parents be identified?
      • your parents will certainly know. but you don’t want to hate on them, even if estranged. i legally changed my last name so that my father couldn’t be identified.
    • but what about vernacular?
      • use a particular syntax up front a few times to establish them, and then let it go.
      • a choice word here and there.
      • a few sentences up front, and then let it go. otherwise you exhaust readers.

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Wow, I went camping for five days. In that time:

1) Avogadro Corp won the Gold award for Science Fiction Book of the Year from Foreword Reviews.

2) My article on How To Predict the Future went live and was syndicated across dozens of sites and tweeted about almost two hundred times.

3) Brad Feld wrote a review of A.I. Apocalypse, saying “Suarez and Hertling are geniuses at what I call “near-term science fiction” and required reading for any entrepreneur or innovator around computers, software, or Internet. And everyone else, if you want to have a sense of what the future with our machines is going to be like.” 

It was fun to watch all the hubbub at the far end of a very thin data connection through a smartphone. I should go camping more often!

(Massive shout out to Brad Feld and the fine folks at Foreword Reviews.)

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A great article by Dean Wesley Smith on The Secret Myth of Traditional Publishing.

An excerpt from his section on the “well known myths”:

– Traditionally published books get better promotion. Well, not really, unless your advance is way, way above six figures, and even then you are going to be doing a ton of it yourself. These days a midlist book out of a traditional publisher gets NO promotion. You do it either way.

– You get more respect if you sell your book to a traditional publisher.  Well, maybe in your own head, but real readers never care if Bantam or Bongo Books published the book they love. If it looks professional and is clean and easy to read, they will never notice the publisher. This one is only a concern to insecure writers who need professional help. Or authors who care nothing of writing, but only want to be published to brag and sit on panels at conferences or join writer’s organizations. They are not writers, they are authors.

Read the whole article here.

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Writing Short Stories
Bruce Holland Rogers
Willamette Writers June 2012
  • Metaphors of length
    • a novel is like a house, where you can explore all the rooms, even the closets
    • a short story is intended to deliver the reader to a single effect: one specific idea or feeling. 
      • a short story invites the reader to stand outside of one the window of one room, and look in and see what is going on.
    • a short short story
      • requires the reader to kneel outside the door the peer through the keyhole.
      • it is also a story of a single effect, but… the story gains something by the effect of being so short.
  • the short short allows you to take advantage of the fact that a reader will read a page or two of almost anything.
    • so if you want to do something experimental, something demanding of the reader, then do it as a short short.
    • if you did it as a longer work, they might punt by page 3.
  • terminal pleasure. 
    • not the pleasure that kills you, the pleasure you get as you read the last words of a book.
    • if all if you have to end with is a clever pun or a small idea, then you can’t write a novel. you have to write something short.
    • conversely, if you have a terminal pleasure that is vast and life changing, then you probably can’t get there with anything less than a novel.
  • short story structure
    • google “budrys seven part story”
    • beginning
      • character in a context with a problem
        • who is this person? where is the person in space and time and socially? what is the characters problem? ideally the problem is the biggest problem this character has faced in life up until now.
    • middle
      • character trying to solve the problem and failing through most of the middle
        • if there character tries and fails just once, that’s maybe just bad luck.
        • if they try two times and fail, that’s raising the stakes: this is a serious problem
        • if they try three times and fail, the reader starts to recognize the pattern of their failures
    • end
      • fourth attempt:
        • if they are the hero: the character assesses themselves, the problem, arrive at some insight, and change the approach to solving the problem. they trying again and succeeding.
        • if they are the villain: the character tries the same approach again, and fails.
      • validation: the character succeeded, but now we need to signal to the reader that the character really did succeed, and now we’re at the end of the story: “Who was that masked man? I want to thank him.”
        • for horror: it’s the anti-validation: the villain’s hand coming up through the dirt.
  • momentum lines
    • we assume, for people and for characters, that people stay on the line they are. if suddenly they depart from that line, we want to know why.
    • tell your story by writing three scenes:
      • a scene which establishes their momentum
      • a scene which could knock someone off in life. it shouldn’t show the character being knocked off, just that it could happen to someone.
      • a scene in which the character got knocked off their line: proof of the new direction.
  • the market for short stories
    • In the past there was a market that was lucrative, diverse, and large. Then came television.
    • There are remnants of this past: digest magazines in the science fiction and horror genres. But even ten years ago, the list was longer.
    • There are still a few oddball markets: the grocery store checkout stand magazine; woman’s world(?)
      • but they are shrinking and fading
    • It’s still possible, but it involves being flexible.
    • I sell 3 short stories a month by annual subscription, delivered by email.
    • Most of the short story collections being published are by novelists, and the publisher does it mostly as a gift to the author to keep the relationship.
    • Most of the markets today are on the web. Mostly for short short stories. Some of them pay reasonably well.
    • (And I don’t think this is a sign of shortening attention span, but simply more fragmented days.)
    • Edward Hock: the last full-time short story writer. He’d have two or three stories in a given magazine, under his name as well as several pseudonyms.
    • ebooks is another new market.
    • Some of the people who subscribe want more than just to read short stories: they want to feel that they are a patron of the arts. 
    • educational publishers
      • they might want a short story to put into an educational text
      • they are increasingly putting them online
      • (they have a captive audience, so it’s one segment that is not diminishing.)
  • Questions
    • Have you looked into graphic novels as avenue?
      • It brings the added challenge of finding someone talented to work with.
      • BTW: check out Scott McCloud’s graphic novel about the history of comics.
      • It is expensive to generate and share a graphic novel.
      • You might see this happen more with the kindle fire.
    • Are you publishing on kindle? What do you do once you exhaust your list of Facebook friends?
      • If you go with a traditional publisher, they always ask: “What is your platform?”
      • Anywhere I go, anywhere I talk, I’m hopefully leaving my name as a vibration in the air that maybe people will pick up.
      • You have to build a platform no matter what. But: If you do it as an independent writer, then you’ll keep more of the money.
        • BTW: even if you lose work through piracy, you’re still getting exposure.
    • What about people who write a short story and put it up on kindle for 99 cents?
      • Why are we writing? For more than just the money. reputation, satisfaction, etc.
      • The real question: Is the work good?
      • Content is now coming at us like firehoses. How do we select which 99 cents works to read?
      • you kind of have to risk the 99 cents occasionally, and see if you like the work, and if you do, then you are finding new authors you like, and if you don’t, then 99 cents is the price you have to pay to find out.
    • What role do contests and awards play, where do you find out where they are?
      • If part of building your platform is winning awards, then which awards do you pursue to help?
      • That’s a little bit tricky. 
      • Some contests are really good, but not well known.
      • Some contests are mostly money making.
      • Sometimes looking at who is winning the contests is good.
      • Look at Poet’s and Writers: not the advertisements, but their editorial content.
      • What are the awards that have high visibility?
        • Google it: do lots of people know it and use it and discuss it?
      • “Micro Award”: did work to get it well represented on wikipedia.
    • Short short short
      • If I could get 4 subscribers I would write 1 story that year
      • If I could get 12 subscribers I would write 3 stories a year
      • Had a scheme to go all the way up to the a story a week
      • (but maxed out at 3 stories a month.)
      • Tried a gift subscription package, with a discount, as a way to get friends of friends

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As a writer, I fear losing my manuscript in ways that I’ve never feared losing any other file. And having seen other writers lose their files due to hard drive crashes, viruses, simple mistakes, or stolen laptops, I have seen the grief associated with such loss.

You can avoid this. Here are four easy ways to backup your manuscript and avoid disaster. However, before I list them, you must keep two very important principles in mind:

Multiple versions: It is very important to maintain multiple older versions of your files. Why? Let’s say a  virus infected your computer and corrupts your manuscript file, but you don’t know it yet. Then you backup your manuscript onto a USB drive, copying over the only other existing copy. Now both the original file and the backup file are corrupted. To counter-act this, you want a backup solution that maintains all (or at least many) of the older versions of your files. This way you can go as far back as needed to fine a working version of your file.

Multiple locations: If you backup to a hard drive in your home and have a flood, fire, or theft, you could lose both your computer and your backup location at once. Just having your data in the cloud (e.g. with Google Docs) isn’t insurance against this, because they can have failures too. Ideally you want your files in multiple locations: In your home and somewhere on the internet at a minimum.

In order of ease of use and security, here are my recommendations:

1. Install backup software 

This is the single best thing you can do, because once it’s installed, you can forget about it, and it’ll keep working for you. Do a quick google search for backup software, pick something, and install it. On the Mac, you can use the built-in Time Machine, but Super-Duper is popular as well. Lifehacker has several recommendations for Windows backup software.

Ease of setup: medium
Security: good to excellent (depending on where you back up: ideally it would include the cloud and an external drive)

2. Install Dropbox

Dropbox is fantastic software for sharing files between computers and to the cloud. (Cloud meaning, in this case, their servers on the Internet.) I use Dropbox to share files between my personal computer and my work computer, and a copy of the files also reside on Dropbox’s servers. This means that there are always at least three copies of my files. If you upgrade to the paid version of Dropbox, you can store all older revisions of your files.

Ease of setup: extremely easy
Security: good

3. Email to yourself on Gmail

If you have a Gmail account, which is effectively unlimited in size, you can easily email your entire manuscript to yourself as frequently as needed. Because the files are maintained on Google’s servers, if anything happens to your computer, you can still access them from anywhere you can log into Gmail.

Ease: medium (you have to remember to do it)
Security: medium (again, you have to remember to do it)

4. Copy to USB drive

You can also copy your files to a USB drive. These are so cheap they’re almost free. You can get a tiny (in size) flash drive, or a larger hard-drive based model that can backup your entire computer.

Ease: medium (you have to remember to do it, and you have to find/have the USB drive.)
Security: medium-poor (you can lose the drive, it can crash, etc.)

I hope that you’ll do at least one, if not two of these methods. Otherwise you are putting yourself at risk for a loss of your manuscripts, and that is a very painful loss to experience.