For all two of my readers I have to apologize for the absence.  it was just one of those weeks……  and looks to be another of that type as well, but not as bad but just as busy.  Well, last week really wasn’t busy, but it started that way.  You see I was working on my time travel book, the one I am slowly rolling out over on royal road (link in the top menu) last Monday.

Then later, I having a really productive day, like twenty pages good.. then it happened.  I actually remember to eat and left the computer. It went to standby, like these things usually do, then when I got back it was running slow as hell.   I tried to log back in and nothing…. so I waited.  Then I after about thirty minutes I just shut it off, thinking a reboot would solve it, as it usually does.  Then it went into a diagnostic loop.  The kind where it enters repair mode, then tries to diagnose, and finally fix the problem.

I waited more, and it kept doing it.  Then I went to sleep while it continued.  I woke up and it was still doing it.  So I did the normal, created the windows boot drive , etc etc.  It was starting to piss me off.  More so because I hadn’t backed up my work for the day.  Now, any writer, student, or person working on the big presentation will tell you what it feels like to lose that much work.  Needless to say the last thing on my mind was writing now.

So when I exhausted the breadth of my tech knowledge I took it to the geek squad.  Now say what you will about these guys, the weird uniforms and the overpriced services, the one thing they didn’t do was patronize me.  I told them what I had done and they wrote it down and went from there.  I think it sped up the process.  I hate it when I go somewhere and they treat me like a moron even though I have some idea of what I am doing.  Anyway, I got the $200 year of service once I found out that the diagnostic and potential data retrieval was gonna be like $170 alone.

I figured what the shit, the plan covers all of my stuff.  With 2 laptops, a desktop, 3 tablets, a kindle and two phones I figured why not?  I’ll just bring in all my stuff over the course of each month and milk it.  Plus I got descent virus and malware programs, not that I need them, but my kid likes to surf uncharted waters, so it’s not a bad thing to have.  Back the tale though.

They tried to save the device, but the hard drive was damaged, they did manages to save the my work.  So bless them for that.  I will never buy a cheap ass laptop/tablet hybrid again.  I am just gonna get the real deal.  It was my spare laptop though.  The one complaint I did have though was that then never tried to do the boot drive, I mean I gave them the one I had made.  I managed to get the system kind of started when I got home, but after an hour I got pissed and introduced it to my coffee table a couple of times.

Then the beeping started.  This is where it got fun.  I took it to the garage and introduced it to a hammer.  I mean if it isn’t working, why not have some fun and take a week’s worth of worry and frustration out on it.  Well I guess the compact nature of the device and hitting the battery compartment make for a good show.  It flamed up and let out a ton of smoke.  It was actually kind of cool.  And so close to the fourth.

The point is, I was so distraught at potentially losing 5,000 words of work (almost 10% of the total at this point) that nothing else as far as writing even appealed to me.  Needless to say, now I am paranoid about it.  Even though I have another laptop, I am using my tablet for writing.  it has a USB port and I open and autosave to that directly.  Not the best approach and the smaller keyboard is annoying, but I would rather be annoyed than lose that much work again.

So this week, I’ll be posting two chapters to Royal Road.  Not the best treat, since I am just playing catchup.  With any luck I can actually finish this friggin book this week.  Needs more action though.  I seem to have that problem a lot though.  I also have to haul 1000 miles to get my clone, then 1000 back, in two days….  Not because I have to, but because I want to.  I hate the drive, but I can do it in about 13-14 hours.  Man I can’t wait till he ‘s old enough to drive…..