As I type this, my normal laptop is sat in some repair place back with the company who made it, hopefully being saved.
Last weekend, on June 3rd, it just refused to turn on. My last back-up was May 12th.
So firstly, back up your work. Do it now. I shall wait.
Done? Great.
Luckily, this little laptop from 2010 does still run. It’s slow. I can’t have more than 2 tabs open in Chrome, and a Word Document open at once without it freezing up. But it works. I’m slowly adding to my novel file [from the May 12th backup], and as much as possible, trying to keep progress steady.
I’ve assumed that they may save my files – no point re-writing it all if they may return the laptop with all files still included. I did summarise the key plot points to ‘bridge the gap’ in the saved version though – in case they need to replace the harddrive and I have lost those 1,175-odd words.
So I’m plodding along, but at a slower, slightly… miffed… pace. I don’t want to write a bunch and get into it if I may need to throw my energy backwards into re-creating 3-weeks-worth of work. I had a couple of projects progressing – likely adding up to 7-8k of work in reality. I end up feeling that I can’t really move forward because I may need to jump back, but also know that’s not really logical – that any progress I make could still be applied to recovered files.
It’s a mental block more than anything.
But when mental blocks first arise, I find ‘fighting’ them doesn’t work, so I’ll stick to my ‘write at least 1 fiction word a day’ goal, and I’ll let myself focus on my university submissions: those are only saved on my USB stick since I take it to work 5-days a week but also bring it home to add to. I’ve thankfully lost no progress on for my post-graduate course.
And in a few weeks, I’ll hopefully have my speedy-2014-laptop back, know what progress I need to recreate, and can throw myself back into the creative fray.
For now, it’s okay to take a slower pace.
