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Keeping files consistently backed up is a pain.

I’m pretty good about it–I back up to an external hard drive regularly and to DVD yearly, and I email manuscript files to myself whenever I remember.

But if my computer were to crash randomly, all that wouldn’t realistically keep me from losing days or weeks of writing work, which depending on those days or weeks could be at best painful and at worst disastrous.

I’ve known for a long time I should be using dropbox or a like system.  I swear everyone uses one of these things but me.  But I’m always skeptical of new things that promise to simplify my life.  In my experience, the best way to keep my life simple is to depend on as few devices and services and gadgets as possible, and not to fix things that are not broken.

But my backup system was inadequate, and therefore broken.  Finally fear of data loss motivated me to sign up and try it.

And while I still have no desire for a smart phone or an ipod or an e-reader or a gps, I discovered that dropbox is totally awesome.

All I did was download the thing, and then link my shortcuts to all my important files to pull from my dropbox folder instead of my hard drive.  Now every time I type a sentence (and obsessively hit ctrl-s), that sentence gets saved to a server somewhere.  Better yet, I can access all my work on both our desktop and my laptop, which makes working with our budget and work schedule files much easier.

And I never have to think about it again.  That’s my kind of simplification.

One matter that needs to be settled in every writing group is how to decide who to critique first each week.  I once had a group who decided this by a round of rock, paper, scissors.  The game could go on for five or six rounds sometimes, before we had an actual winner.  Some people enjoyed this.  I did not.

Another group critiqued in order of arrival.  That worked well when we weren’t meeting at anyone’s house, because no one was necessarily first.  That same group once chose according to whose birth date was closest to the current date.  A skype group I was in chose based on whose submission was up on a certain group member’s screen when it was time to start.

By far my favorite method, though, is the one used in my current group.  We roll a scatter die.

The arrow points to the first person, and then we proceed clockwise.  Simple, quick, fair and we get to roll a die.  Can’t ask for better than that.

This is Teddy, one of my two favorite miniatures.  He’s been done for a while, but I just recently put him on his base.

My other favorite mini has been half done for almost a year.  I’m hoping to have it done by the end of March.  I have a roleplaying game I’d like to use her in coming up.  She’s intimidating to work on, though, so it’s taking me a long time.

Hush little baby, don’t you scream,
Coach is gonna buy you a skaven team.
And if those filthy rats can’t score,
Coach is gonna buy you a Kroxigor.
And if some goblin fouls your lizard,
Coach is gonna buy you a freebooter wizard.
And if your wizard lost his scrolls,
Coach is gonna buy you some team rerolls.
And if those rerolls fail your player,
Coach is gonna buy you a dwarf troll slayer.
And if that dwarf–he don’t slay trolls,
Coach is gonna buy you some death that rolls.
And if that deathroller’s seen by the ref,
Coach is gonna buy you a halfling chef.
And if that chef don’t do the trick,
Coach is gonna buy you a pogo stick.
And if that looney jumps too far,
Coach is gonna buy you an ogre star.
And if great Morg-n-Thorg falls down,
You’ll still be the dirtiest player in town.