Wednesday, January 09, 2019

~choke~

No pictures. It got ugly up in here for awhile. Still ain't pretty.

I'm ok now, but jeez Louise, technology will throw you under the bus the first chance it gets as if it were a living breathing enemy and not a mere tool.

I was minding my business, chipping away at the mountain that is Prophets Tango (my book in progress) congratulating myself that I had only EIGHTEEN scenes to run a fine comb through. Something I laughingly called, the Last Pass before I let others have at it.

Colin was scheduled to shut down the power to the whole house to replace an outlet in the kitchen. We were both nervous, but I was underfoot and so left him to it. Deciding to take a break, I closed the laptop. It powered off instead of going to sleep.

When I went back to it I realized that sometime in the not so distant past week to ten days, I decided that *spacebar* was not a great password and changed it. But to what? There was a hint "lunar". Nothing I tried worked. I was locked out. The fan was still failing, causing the machine to overheat. 

All of this to say, I threw in the towel of home-baked remedies and hacking and took it the repair place. After two days, neither problem could be cured and they handed me the contents of my hard drive copied onto a nice external drive and the original drive removed from the dead machine, now living in its own nice little box like a hermit crab.  140$ thank you.

So I sighed, brought drives home and thought I'd be back in business on my old faithful Acer here, just plucking the needed info from the backup. Think again.

After an hour of keyboard gyrations, I was no closer to getting back to work than I was when the lights went out. Scrivener, the app I use with all its wonderful complexity, had failed me on top of everything else.

 I still had a recent copy of the MS and an online place where recent edits still lived so, nothing was really lost except, cash, momentum, and of course, the travel laptop, which had been a gift from my sister.

Since August, for reasons seasonal and hormonal - I have lost about half of my hair. I should shut up about that because I still have more than most people ever will, but it's been depressing. My car interior looks like I own a collie. Now I'm afraid to look close in the mirror because I'm pretty sure the roots are going to be white.

Worse things have happened to writers.

All of this feels frivolous in the face of what hardworking Americans are facing with the ongoing temper tantrum of the Shitweasel squatting in the Oval Office.

off my soapbox

7 comments:

Joanne S said...

OMG---what a crap fest. I was holding my breath that the manuscript was lost.

grace Forrest~Maestas said...

Whaa

Deb Lacativa said...

the tool, Scrivener, has a feature called 'compile'. At the end of every writing session, I religiously compile the whole document and save a copy to an online storage space. Grateful for small rituals.

Ms. said...

((((Whewq!)))

Dana said...

Aw Deb, what a technological shitstorm. My sympathies.

deemallon said...

None of this is frivolous. Major aggravating bullshit, more like. Passwords I sometimes think are the fucking bane of my existence. But when I consider how you might feel if you’d lost your manuscript, it does seem kinda minor.

Joanne S said...

What now?