Woe

I just want to mention that my laptop is in the shop, and it may take up to another two weeks to get it back, and this is KILLING ME.

There have been times when I didn’t so much as glance at my laptop for months at a time. No doubt in the future there will be times when I would voluntarily quit working on any project for extended periods. But this is not one of those times.

Oh, what happened was this flow of events:

1. Close a file.
2. Say “copy this file”
3. Put flash drive in computer
4. Say “paste here”
5. Computer: That file is no longer available. In fact, that file has been deleted from your hard drive. It’s not in the trash, though. It’s completely gone. Have a nice day!

So, I lost a day of work that way. I started to save twice a day. Then the computer zapped the entire folder that file had been in — the file was Tarashana and the folder was the Tuyo folder, with everything to do with Tuyo in it. All this was on multiple flash drives, so I only lost a day of work, but still, this is not an ideal situation, as you can imagine.

My computer-expert brother suggested never closing the file before saving, always doing it with a “save as” with the file open, and that worked. I got through all of Christmas break that way. Just to be sure, I literally did not ever close the Tarashana file for three weeks, though I could always have restored it to the computer from whatever flash drive.

But it’s not like it’s okay for files and folders to vanish, particularly if that is a sign the hard drive is going to melt down shortly. Thus, the computer is in the shop. So I don’t have my computer. So this is driving me insane.

Do you realize I wrote out those back-cover descriptions for the Tenai trilogy BY HAND on PAPER with a PENCIL? Talk about going back to the dark ages.

Okay, now I am off to try to find lines of poetry that might work for book titles by looking at a paper book, with a pencil in my hand to take notes.

Also, my phone just started shutting itself off at random moments.

TECHNOLOGY, UGH.