52 Novels

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Sorry.

That headline’s bad. Really bad.¹

But try and set that aside for a moment and follow along with me, because this series just might save your ass.

First, though, close your eyes and imagine a world where writing projects—whether they’re novels or family holiday newsletters—go smoothly, from the first shitty draft through the final polished revision, ready to release into the wild of the real world.

Keep your eyes closed.

Next, I want you to visualize never having <Ctrl-Z> rendered useless by a sudden loss of power to your computer.

Now imagine a writing session where you’ve noodled with a paragraph—or an entire scene or chapter—and absolutely adored every word you wrote. In fact, you loved it so much you clicked Save the second after you wrote it because it’s as perfect as perfect can be.

Now wake up, because that world exists only in a dream.

We all know the reality of things is much, much different. No, what we experience is typically opposite of how we want it to go:

• Microsoft Word crashes and we pray to the Writing Gods, as the program restarts, that the auto-recovery save ran sometime before the doc went tits up. But we all know too well that we’re probably hosed.
• We spend a half hour tweaking a scene, hitting <Ctrl-S> numerous times. You know, just to be safe. Then we realize we liked it better the way it was two days ago.
• We leave an unsaved version of our work open on the computer desktop and a family member closes it down. “Oh, I just clicked No because I assumed you saved it already.” This, of course, leaves us channeling Nancy Kerrigan, circa 1994. “Why? Why? Why?”
• Insert some other similarly tragic end here. There really are eight million stories in the naked city.

I’m a tech writer at my day job. I work with and write about technology just about every week day of the year. As part of that work, I maintain more than a dozen book-length printed documents and nearly a thousand HTML files. (Yes, I realize that’s a silly nightmare considering how simple it is to deliver dynamic content these days.)

Considering, my co-worker and I would be screwed if we didn’t have some sort of system that helps us keep track of versions. That’s why we use version control tools.

“What’re those,” you ask. “And why should I care?”

Were you not paying attention? Jeesh. You think I type this stuff up for my health?

In all seriousness, version control tools allow you to keep track of multiple versions of your documents without actually maintaining multiple copies of the documents themselves. With version control you can forever banish Save as… to the Island of Unused Toolbar Commands.

How is this possible?

Simple.

Version control tools are just repositories—or databases—that do all the revision management for you:

• No more maintenance of multiple files and folders.
• No more cryptic file naming conventions to keep things straight.
• No more remembering whether you just did a Save as… or a normal Save.

Intrigued?

Then be sure to drop by in the coming days for parts 2 and 3 of… The version suicides.

1. Count your lucky stars… I almost titled this series, “Versions? We don’t need no stinking versions.” [⇑]

The last time around, I wrote about why you need version control. This time around it’s about some of the tools available.

Trust me… there are quite a few. Unfortunately, there’s not enough space or time to explore them in the span of a single blog post. Instead I’ll just cover the ones I’ve used: Microsoft Word, Visual Source Safe, and Subversion.

Cool?

But first, let’s recap how we got here:

• Writing is an inexact science. We write. And rewrite. And rewrite again. And not always for the better. Version control keeps track of every revision… right down to every last save if you want it to.¹
• Microsoft Word, as great as it is,² has some enormous flaws, chief among them is its instability. Version control can help you mitigate the damage when Word decides to flush your work down the crapper.
• Developing and implementing naming conventions and filing systems to keep your work organized can be a major chore. Version control virtually removes the need for such things entirely.

And, now, let’s get to it…

Microsoft Word

Already, within the confines of this series, I’ve both slagged and sung the praises of Microsoft’s flagship office app. And we both know that any of either that the venerable word processor gets is probably justified.

For every crash, there’s a way that Word—especially since Word 2000—really helped you roundly kick a document’s ass. It’s truly a program that’s useful for more than just writing letters.

In fact, I routinely create full-length books using nothing but Word because it formats my text, headers, footers, tables of contents, and indexes with ease. I figure if I use about 15 percent of Word’s features, then the average person uses considerably less than that.

In other words, there’s a lot more we can do with Microsoft Word but we choose not to learn. Understanding this, most people probably don’t know about the feature called Versions.

Using this feature Word will allow you to save multiple versions of a document in progress with a few clicks of your mouse. On the tool bar,³ just go to File → Versions… and Word opens the Versions window, as shown here:

Click Save Now…, enter some comments, and Word keeps track of the document’s versioning for you.

But not without a price. And a heavy one at that.

What Microsoft doesn’t tell you is that each these versions is kept within the same document… Word simply hides the previous versions so you can’t see them.

This means your file becomes bloated and cumbersome. And gigantically problematic for Word—and you—in the long run.

I’ve lost entire version trails because the latest version of a document I was working on simply got too large… as in “fifteen times its normal file size” too large.

When that happened, Word simply did the software equivalent of throwing a rod.

Poof.

There went days worth of versions. Gone. Sort of defeats the purpose of saving versions, no? Luckily, I still had my latest and greatest working version.

I’m not saying you can’t use this feature. It works well enough if the project is small. But there’s no way in hell I’d recommend using it for your manuscript.

Microsoft Visual SourceSafe

Now this is a piece of software. Designed for all sorts of projects—large or small—that require you to keep your source files secure, Microsoft’s Visual SourceSafe can handle just about anything you throw at it.

It uses a robust, yet compact, database that captures each and every version of a virtually limitless number of files. At my day job, we have years and years worth of source code stored inside our SourceSafe.

If we need to roll back code or a document to a version from 2000… we can. And with just a few mouse clicks.

Easy, peasy.

However, this comes at a heavy price, too: the one on the box.

Order this from Amazon and it’ll set you back $500.

If you can afford it, or if you think you need something this powerful, go ahead and get SourceSafe. Otherwise, I suggest you save your money.

Subversion

Last up is an ultra-compact bit of software that gives you the flexibility of the versioning capabilities native to Microsoft Word along with much of the power that comes in the Redmond Beast’s Visual SourceSafe.

What’s more is that Subversion is open source and 100 percent free of charge. The sound of that alone is enough to make most people sit up and take notice.

What I like best about Subversion is its small footprint: I have a cheapo USB thumbdrive with a whopping 64 megabytes of capacity that serves as my writing-project repository (Subversion’s term for database), and I’m not in any danger of running out of room on the stick any time soon.

And just so you know, that’s each and every one of my writing projects… not just my current novel-in-progress.

Further, because my Subversion repository lives on a thumbdrive, I can take it anywhere I can plug in to a computer with a USB 2.0 port. It’s really helpful when I’m researching at the library. I just pop in the drive and write notes to a simple text editor. Add the notes to the repository and they’re now under source control, too.

If you prefer, and if you have suitable Web hosting, you can also install your repository on at your Web host. It’s something I prefer not to do, if for no other reason than I’m the one who’s in charge of my thumbdrive.

No offense to the nice people at DreamHost, but I trust myself more than I trust them.⁴

In any case, if you haven’t figured it out by now, Part 3 is the post where I teach you how to install a Subversion repository on your own thumbdrive.⁵

Stick around, folks. It’ll be here soon.

1. Depending on which software you use and how you configure it. More about this in Part 3. [⇑]
2. I really mean that. I think it’s a wonderful tool… especially Word 2007. [⇑]
3. This process is for people using Word 2000 or Word 2003. Microsoft removed the feature in Word 2007. [⇑]
4. For good measure, though, I do back up my repository to a GMail account. I strongly recommend you do something similar. [⇑]
5. Or desktop, laptop, iPod, or any other USB storage device. [⇑]