I hit 80k words last Friday – it felt damn good. I added a little sumpin’ to the word pile on Sat, knocking out 1000 words in an hour. I am set to finish up within the deadline I set in April – the end of August for my first draft.
My laptop has other ideas. It crapped the bed, so to speak, yesterday. I headed down to the shed to get another stolen hour of writing in before we headed to a going away party for a friend of ours. I plugged everything in, got my writing mix rolling on the ipod, and hit the on button. Nothing. No lights, no familiar whir of the fan, no glowing reassurance from the LCD screen. Maybe it felt overworked or maybe it just didn’t like my work.
I check a bunch of stuff. I took the thing apart (I only had three screws left over once I put it back together!). I tested the AC adapter. It would seem the problem is in the box itself. Good times.
Plan B – I dragged down our 10-year-old desktop (Dell Dimension XPS T500 – phat.) from the attic after much searching and help from my wife. She has a knack for finding lost things. I got everything up and running by 12:30 AM and went to bed.
Turns out I lost my last thousand words, as I had not backed them up on my external hard drive. I’ve surpassed Google Docs allowance for document size and have not broken the writing up to submit in smaller chunks. I’m hoping I can retrieve it from my laptop, but in the meantime, upward and onward.
P.S. I’m considering dumping Windows XP for an open source operating system. If anyone has any suggestions, please feel free to comment.
I’m still hanging with Windows and haven’t made the Apple leap.
I don’t trust too many of the open source operating systems yet. I don’t trust Windows, either. Frankly, I don’t trust anything electronic although I back up every night to two different flash drives. When I finish a chapter, I print a hard copy. I’m a BIG fan of paper. It doesn’t tend to disappear in a blink. 😉
Good luck, and I’ll be peeking back in to see if you decide on a different open source operating system.
Teresa
I installed ubuntu this morning and have been monkeying around with trying to get my wireless card working for the last several hours. There goes my writing time.
I’m not a tech expert, but I’m also not a novice when it comes to computers and, so far, I feel like I’m learning how to get around and do stuff for the first time while using ubuntu. My hope is, just like windows, the more I use it, the more sense it makes.
My motivation was to try to minimize the applications running in the background and put my old computer back in circulation. We’ll see.
I forgot to say that I’ve become a huge fan of open source stuff. Ever since a friend hipped me to Firefox I’ve enjoyed a number of application that served my needs fine for $0. Can’t beat it.
Ah, you must be pod!! Could be worse, at least it is only an hour work.
Like, Teresa, I also save on my flash drive after each writing session. I also e-mail chunks of my work out to family for safe keeping.
Yeah, for some reason, I chose not to back up that snippet of writing. Good call. Any time something like this happens I am adamant about never making that mistake again. For a few weeks, anyhow.
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