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If you’ve been reading my FB updates or tweets then you’ll know that a few days ago my hard drive stopped working. It has since been replaced and I have now restored as much as I can – not off the old drive you understand; the only way to recover anything off there is to open it up in a clean room, transfer the disk to another drive casing, slave it to a PC and lift off whatever I am able. The day it went down I saved the document and thought (I actually thought it, damnit!) that it’s about time I uploaded the manuscript. Instead of doing just that I shutdown and went off to cook dinner. Later my husband opened up the laptop and found, to my complete horror, that the drive was unresponsive. The last time I’d uploaded/backed up the data was 10 days ago. 10 days! That’s a heck of a lot of work and the last two of those I had chopped, changed and fully edited about three chapters.
Penny Harper, Linda Turvey and I had attended a Marie Claire Writers’ conference a year or so ago when the speaker – Marian Keyes – spoke of one of her manuscripts dissolving into the web ether. She lost half a book and had to sit down and rewrite it from scratch. She maintains that it was one of the best things to happen as she firmly believes the rewrite was far superior to the original, even if it had been edited. I keep remembering that and, not that I completely agree with her, but it made me feel a little better to think that if she managed to mentally retrieve her work then there is some hope left for me. So, instead of taking my drive to the nearest computer whizzkid, I shall go ahead and redo the work.
My wonderful drive, RIP.
PS I am not blaming my husband at all in case it reads that way, even if I felt like thumping him a little bit at the time.
Banished by Bea Turvey
I told you not to put it in the dishwasher !!
Your ever attentive husband.
Mwah, mwah! If Dell read this and demand their laptop back you’ll have to buy me a new one!