I lost my friend today.

My beloved laptop, the first I've ever owned, which has lasted my seven, almost eight years, bit the dust today. Well, nearly.

I had some Word docs open and I was wokring on them. Two of these documents were my new expanded outline for the novel, and Chapter 10 of the novel. I'd made some really good progress on the outline, working out some confusing plot points and such, and I was halfway through a really good action scene in Chapter 10, when Word froze. I got the message that Word had somehow performed some illegal operation and had to quit.

I thought I was safe, because I typically save my docs every ten minutes and every time i hop to a different doc. But I found out that any document that was still open reverted back to the original file. Last night's file.

So all today's work was lost. Gone, unrecoverable. The useless temp files only had my name and assorted gibberish.

The really shitty thing is, this is the first day in weeks that I really made solid progress on the outline. I felt so good after I reached Chapter 8 in the outline and had added all sorts of items that the story needed.

Why couldn't the laptop have died yesterday, when I'd only added a scene or two? Why now? And I was good, I had saved my work!

I was able to get the laptop to boot finally, and recover a few files, but not the outline and not Chapter 10. Mruphy's Law. The laptop won't boot anymore, it drops into Registry Repair, says it has recovered a good Registry, and then reboots, only to come back to the same Registry Repair screen.

Sigh.

The laptop is very old, and I am a little sad about losing it, especially since Mary has decreed that we will not be shelling out for a new one any time soon.

I'm trying to reconstruct the outline, and I am having a hell of a bad time. I can almost remember where I added or changed something, but cannot remember what I did.

I guess the best thing now is just to calm down. I'm going to make myself a drink. And then just try to do the outline again. It's probably easier to just start from where I did this morning and make changes rather than to try and remember what I did.

Let's see ... I think there's 7&7 in the house...