An End Brings A Pause
Well, it’s finally happened. After about five years of slave-labour loyal service (and one year on top of that as a showroom display), my laptop seems to have finally given up the ghost. It’s been a long time coming – the CD/DVD drive somehow became just a DVD drive sometime early last year, the original power pack exploded (with a bang!) earlier this year, and it would scream in protest if I try to open filezilla while already having firefox and photoshop open already – so now the whole thing seems to have finally died.
I am writing this from the family’s desktop, which only reminds me of how much I miss having a computer in my room, with all my programs and files and everything. I miss my firefox install, with its bookmarks and addons and British-English spellcheck.
Don’t worry if the laptop takes my novels with it: the most recent versions of Blood Bound are with my wonderful beta, and the beginning fragments of Bones and The Superhero Diaries can be pieced together from stuff I have in various emails/from my notebook. I will have to do some extra typing and re-do a few things, but it could have been far, far worse.
In a way, this is a good thing, as I have been wanting a new laptop for some time now. The bad side, on the other hand, is that I cannot afford a new laptop right now, and it will take me about a month until I have saved enough money for the replacement I have got my eye on. So I am trying to look on the bright side in the meantime: being online less will mean less online distractions, so I can write my novels by hand in my notebook; I have noticed that when I type things up online from handwritten notes things get expanded, and my word count increases. So hooray for that.
So don’t worry about me if I am not online as much as usual. I’m still around, still writing… and looking for things that I need to get rid of anyway, and figure how much they’d be worth on TradeMe. It seems that not only am I trying to trim the fat on my body, but everywhere else now, too.
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Oh that sucks, I don’t know what I’d do if that happened to my laptop. Good luck saving for a new one!
@Kiandra: Thanks. I am trying to come up with ideas to scrape together funds a little bit faster, like selling old textbooks I never read (worth anywhere from 50-80NZD, maybe more) and the external CD drive that I won’t need with a new laptop, and try and find other odd jobs around the place. Cheap custom themes/designs maybe? *shrugs*
That sucks! You ever thought abou having a memory stick or external harddrive just for backup? I know you said things are fine for your novels, but this way you wouldn’t have to piece things together, or your other files you’ve lost. I think it’s relatively cheap to get a memory stick – it’s something like £15 over here, so I don’t think it should be too bad in NZ.
@Jo: I do have an external harddrive, and that’s why 140GB of files were saved, thank goodness. Blood Bound is safe with JK (and on gmail), as is The Superhero Diaries now that I have looked. The completed Bones chapter was due to be uploaded today, but can be pieced together from two single emails, so that’s no problem.
Hey Catherine, quick question. I downloaded the Quicktags plugin that you use because I’ve been looking for one for forever. How do you get the tags to actually show up in the contact form? It’s activated but nothing’s happening. Sorry for the irrelevant comment.