day 7 and I may be screwed but probably not
Guess who, after some really magnificent disasters in the past -- including a five-way backup failure -- had not backed up her work?
I think it's just another damned update freezing the laptop. I always turn off automatic updates on the desktop, but I couldn't figure out how to on the laptop, and trhere's been a slew of insistent updates coming along and stopping everything. But there's also been some freezes where I couldn't be sure what had happened, and the logon has been failing a bunch, to where I have to take the battery out to shut the computer down thoroughly before anything can proceed (yeah, tell me never do that and then tell me what the hell else to do when you get a complete freeze and you can't even bring up the shutdown screen. Now tell me that's what I get for owning a Vista machine It's not my fault. The kindly uncle who bought the laptop wouldn't get an xp one because it was obsolete, though still being provided at the time: and there's no way I can afford to buy Seven).
So guess how much work is on that machine, hopefully not lost forever? Hopefully when I go back to it later it will be fine, Hopefully, Anyway, here's what:
I'm home today because I'm still sick. I have a voice at all this morning, but it's exhausting to talk still and I sound horrible and there's no way I could be heard across the room. So I took advantage to write nearly 4000 words before I got up. It only took a couple of hours, which is really funny because a lot of it was brand-new material -- by which I mean, not only never written before, bringing chapter three to almost 5000 words. I can't be sure of exact numbers because the freeze took place while I was performing a word count -- anyway, that's more than 1500 words total for the novel.
Seven days of writing, and two months' worth of notes, including somecharacter backgrounds, historical backgrounds, the names of the ethnicities and languages, even the bare bones of the religion which will make me snarl if I have to do that again because it's really really important to these people but not to me -- and it's only important to the stiory because it's important to them. Not to mention a 15,000 word outline.
So. If, as it is likely, the laptop is only misbehaving and not dead, my next task is to set up an offsite storage for the novel. And then maybe figure out what made the computer freeze. "Maybe" because it might not be possible. If it is dead, my nexgt task is to take it to a repair shop with the primary goal of salvaging the material on it and the secondary goal of getting it repaired. If it's impossible or too expensive to repair, I still have the desktop, and I'll be writing downstairs. But that's not ideal. Upstairs is better: all the Sims stuff and frivolous bookmarks are on the downstairs desktop, and also the experience of writing in my bed, looking out my huge back windows on the trees in my yard and the neighborhood beyond, is far more conducive to productivity, as witness that nearly 4000 words in two and a half hours I wrote this morning while too sick to work.
Anyway: accomplished: the other ponies arrive, but he one assigned to Yanek actually "belongs" to the baby for when she's big enough to ride: Yanek is punished for skiving off: Yanek discovers that the books his sister's nurse has been giving him are written by her, and that she's married to the country-house chauffeur, who she says is actually supposed to be his caregiver, not just defacto: and the Duke informs Yanek that he's going back with them to the Palace.
The surprise to me was how much more abusive Yanek's upbringing is than I originally set out to have it, without anything actually changing. I think that in the fleshing out of the events what seemed like more minor things revealed themselves to be kind of shocking. And I think this is because when I was outlining the story I was (1) determined not to write a poor-me Cinderella story and (2) able to accept the adults' version of events.
As it turns out, Yanek is sort of Cinderella. And it also turns out that the people I had put in place to be his protectors are to a surprising degree complicit in his abuse. And yet. There's nothing that happens to Yanek that isn't standard child-rearing practice of the 1900s, except for the relative neglect.
I think it's just another damned update freezing the laptop. I always turn off automatic updates on the desktop, but I couldn't figure out how to on the laptop, and trhere's been a slew of insistent updates coming along and stopping everything. But there's also been some freezes where I couldn't be sure what had happened, and the logon has been failing a bunch, to where I have to take the battery out to shut the computer down thoroughly before anything can proceed (yeah, tell me never do that and then tell me what the hell else to do when you get a complete freeze and you can't even bring up the shutdown screen. Now tell me that's what I get for owning a Vista machine It's not my fault. The kindly uncle who bought the laptop wouldn't get an xp one because it was obsolete, though still being provided at the time: and there's no way I can afford to buy Seven).
So guess how much work is on that machine, hopefully not lost forever? Hopefully when I go back to it later it will be fine, Hopefully, Anyway, here's what:
I'm home today because I'm still sick. I have a voice at all this morning, but it's exhausting to talk still and I sound horrible and there's no way I could be heard across the room. So I took advantage to write nearly 4000 words before I got up. It only took a couple of hours, which is really funny because a lot of it was brand-new material -- by which I mean, not only never written before, bringing chapter three to almost 5000 words. I can't be sure of exact numbers because the freeze took place while I was performing a word count -- anyway, that's more than 1500 words total for the novel.
Seven days of writing, and two months' worth of notes, including somecharacter backgrounds, historical backgrounds, the names of the ethnicities and languages, even the bare bones of the religion which will make me snarl if I have to do that again because it's really really important to these people but not to me -- and it's only important to the stiory because it's important to them. Not to mention a 15,000 word outline.
So. If, as it is likely, the laptop is only misbehaving and not dead, my next task is to set up an offsite storage for the novel. And then maybe figure out what made the computer freeze. "Maybe" because it might not be possible. If it is dead, my nexgt task is to take it to a repair shop with the primary goal of salvaging the material on it and the secondary goal of getting it repaired. If it's impossible or too expensive to repair, I still have the desktop, and I'll be writing downstairs. But that's not ideal. Upstairs is better: all the Sims stuff and frivolous bookmarks are on the downstairs desktop, and also the experience of writing in my bed, looking out my huge back windows on the trees in my yard and the neighborhood beyond, is far more conducive to productivity, as witness that nearly 4000 words in two and a half hours I wrote this morning while too sick to work.
Anyway: accomplished: the other ponies arrive, but he one assigned to Yanek actually "belongs" to the baby for when she's big enough to ride: Yanek is punished for skiving off: Yanek discovers that the books his sister's nurse has been giving him are written by her, and that she's married to the country-house chauffeur, who she says is actually supposed to be his caregiver, not just defacto: and the Duke informs Yanek that he's going back with them to the Palace.
The surprise to me was how much more abusive Yanek's upbringing is than I originally set out to have it, without anything actually changing. I think that in the fleshing out of the events what seemed like more minor things revealed themselves to be kind of shocking. And I think this is because when I was outlining the story I was (1) determined not to write a poor-me Cinderella story and (2) able to accept the adults' version of events.
As it turns out, Yanek is sort of Cinderella. And it also turns out that the people I had put in place to be his protectors are to a surprising degree complicit in his abuse. And yet. There's nothing that happens to Yanek that isn't standard child-rearing practice of the 1900s, except for the relative neglect.