Dec 18, 2016

Always back up your work frequently.  This is a lesson I never seem to learn no matter how many times the universe tries to teach it to me.

I do my typing on an old, old laptop.  Its a heavy brick of a thing that I’m fairly certain is at least 20 years old.  I like that it has real weight, in a pinch I could kill a few zombies with it, and it would likely still run afterwards.  Unfortunately the hard drive is not as durable.  I’ve had a few crashes over the years, but all of those other times I’ve managed to get the hard drive up and running with a few tricks (and at least one full reformat and reinstall).  Well, this time I think it may have truly breathed its last breath.  When all my old tricks failed I even opened it up and checked to make sure everything inside was still working correctly, and it appears to be, but there also looked to be 2 or 3 good sized scratches on the disk itself.

I had gotten up to chapter 25 in my editing before this happened.  Checking my files on flash drive however I had last backed up after editing chapter 4.  What does this mean?  Well, that’s close to a month’s delay as I have to edit the 20 chapters between again, and unfortunately I may lose out on the benefit of certain flashes of insight I had in the last round of editing those.  Oh well, live and learn (or in my case don’t learn, never learn).

I’ve gotta get to work now, expect a real update sometime in the first couple of weeks of January.  For now though, enjoy whatever holiday you celebrate this time of year, and have a happy new year!