feeling like a beast

I am trying hard not to panic. I’m telling myself to stay calm, it will all work out, this crisis will be averted. My son will show up in his armor and riding his white horse and will bring my laptop back to life. (In reality, my son not only doesn’t have a white horse, he doesn’t have anything on four wheels, much less four legs. He got a ride up to my house for thanksgiving with a friend, so is currently at another friend’s house, so I’m not quite sure how he will come to me anyway.)

So my laptop has been so slow and just quirky. It refuses to recognize the printer, no matter how many times I disconnect and disengage and delete it and then reconnect it. So I haven’t been able to print anything for a month or two. A few weeks ago, when I plugged the external drive in to save my stuff, the laptop now refused to recognize that as well. I plugged the drive into our desktop and it popped right up, so I didn’t get too concerned. At least that was working, right?

My son came over yesterday and got the printer working again and was thinking about what to do with the external drive, when we ran out of time, and we had to leave (that’s a longer story than that, but it doesn’t matter). I didn’t think much of it.

Came home last night and the little box was open on the LT asking something about do I want to restart coz it had updated some files. You know those boxes that always pop up? So, I obliged.

When I turned the thing back on, I got the opening screen and it will not move from there. No amount of hitting any keys on the keyboard or the mouse. Have turned it off and on too many times to count. Have even taken the battery out and back in, I don’t know why, but what could it hurt, right?

Even then, I wasn’t close to panic mode. Whatever. Until I plugged that external drive into the desktop just now and realize that it apparently hasn’t been working for some time. I try to save my stuff (ie, that novel I have been writing fervently on) at least once a week. So I thought, worse case scenario, I lost about two weeks of the novel.

Umm, wrong. Nothing has been saved on the drive for two months! Which was twenty chapters ago!

Ok. In reality it is not that bad. Believe it or not, I also emailed myself a copy of the manuscript on November 6, coz sometimes I do that. Yes, I’ve still lost a huge chunk, about seven chapters, and I don’t know if my mind can retrieve it, but I guess I can power through that much, if my son, the white knight, can’t get to my house and save the day.

So, that would be my update for this week. I got nothing else. Good thing is – I didn’t work on my novel all this past week.

How about you? What crises have you had to face in your current WIP? 

What I am starting to feel like.