Thursday, January 04, 2007

January and Possibilities

Well, there I was. All ready to write for hours. House quiet. Cat curled up on the sofa. Dog asleep. The Muse kicking at the door. Boot up computer. Watch computer freeze. Watch computer fall into the abyss, taking printer with it. My one new resolution for this year is to forget yesterday. Ten hours of trying everything on earth I've ever learned about computers, and today I'm on my husband's.

So I started thinking about how Scarlett was right, there's always tomorrow. Just keep on keeping on. Get someone else to excise the computer's gremlins. Becoming a Luddite isn't possible, as much as I might want to. So instead of seeing yesterday as wasted effort, I'm thinking of it as a test - how much do I need to write? If the computer's buggy efforts can't derail me, nothing can. There's always a pencil and a legal pad, and to be honest, it felt wonderful to scribble away by hand for a while. Awkward, but wonderful. The words don't fail just because the hardware goes MIA.

Thank goodness.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Okay, quick question, did you lose everything you had in that computer? Was it savable? That is the sort of things that keeps me awake at night unless I back up my work. Starting over from scratch is just too much to bear.
Char (Rbozo55)

Tracy D said...

Ah, Char, a subject near and dear to my heart. Several years back I lost 100 pages in a crash and burn - a hard lesson which taught me to ALWAYS back up. Bless the inventor of flash drives. I still have backups on those small disks, which can only be used on my ancient IBM laptop, which I keep just for that reason. One day, I need to get them onto a flash drive.

The short answer is - nothing was lost except time and a printer, which never quite recovered. Turns out the new anti-virus download did a number that reacted badly with the IE update. Sigh.

It's still easier than typing and retyping page after page when a rewrite shifts one sentence onto the next page, LOL. I must remember the bad old days of non-electric typewriters...and be grateful for technology.