As if I weren't already frustered with computers these days....  My laptop came back and still is overheating and turning off during normal use.  I'm pursuing a refund.  But that's not the point of this post...

It's forum posts like this that make me afraid of writing in general.  I'm not sure why the thought of using a specialized versus a non-specialized computer program gives me so much anxiety--it just does.  I'm annoyed at transcription work, and while my mother is a transcriptionist and would be more than happy to transcribe my handwritten work for me, if only because she's never been allowed to see any of it otherwise, I'd like to avoid that step altogether.  After all, let's face it, I can barely bring myself to submit my writing to my friends for criticism, much less my mother.  I can see it now, the program I've been using to type up writing crashes in the middle of me writing my BEST SENTENCE EVER, and either it's irretrievable, or I have to pause in the middle of my writing flow to get someone else to come over and fix it, only to find that my flow has been irreversibly stopped.  Both notions inspire thoughts of dread.  I've considered handwriting everything and doing the transcription thing; I can get over my anxiety about my mother reading my work much better than I can get over the anxiety of having lost it all to a silly hunk of metal and plastic.  But then it occurs to me that although I have managed to keep all my diaries since I was 8 providing a diligent digger with lots of blackmail material (all of which should be burned into a fine ash so as not to tempt too many people), I have lost much more important papers before including my annual losing of my passport (which my mother then usually manages to find--it magnetizes to her, it seems).  If I can lose my passport on a regular basis, who is to say that I won't lose my manuscript mid-chapter?  And will I actually end up finding it again?

I know, I know, people will tell me "Back up your files, Erin!"  The truth is that I don't.  Ever.  I always intend to.  Sometimes with things like this, I do end up making multiple copies, or email it to myself (gmail is beautiful that way, no?), but that's only so I can I work on it from somewhere else and usually I only end up with back-ups of partials.  Plus, Word never crashes on me right after I've saved and backed things up.  It only ever crashes on me when I'm in the middle of THE BEST SENTENCE EVER.

So since I already accomplished one of my New Year's Resolutions (find sunshine and beaches), I am going to make a new one to replace it: find a writing system that works for me.  This is in conjunction with a myriad other resolutions (If I make enough of them and work my way down the list, then by the end of the year, even if I haven't gotten to all of them, I know I've at least accomplished something.) including the obvious one-worder "write."  Since this one is related to that one, I figured they could probably be accomplished at the same time, making my efficiency in resolution-accomplishing go way up.