I’m wondering if I can write a book on an iPad. I think the answer is probably not.
I’ll skip most of the details, but my laptop’s hard drive appears to be dead. About 24 hours into the nightmare, I decided it might be time to give up on saving my files. Goodbye 80 zillion versions of A Gift of Time, goodbye my outline. Goodbye all my notes for A Lonely Magic, goodbye everything except the first thousand words of Akira’s trip to Belize. Goodbye Belize cover, goodbye…okay, then I decided that maybe it would be worth trying harder.
Another 6 hours, $60, massive frustration and — I admit it — a few tears, and it appears that not only my hard drive failed, my USB backup drive failed. That just kills me. Like… no. Just no, no, no.
It’s the kind of problem that under other circumstances I would just throw money at. Find a good IT guy — maybe the laptop place I used once before — and pay whatever it takes to see what he or she could do. I’m pretty sure that the hard drive at least has recoverable files. But I don’t have any money these days, so even though I can pretty much guarantee that I’m going to wind up spending something on this, I want it to be as sensible a spending as possible and that means thinking about it.
Password recovery over the next few weeks is going to be such a hassle. And A Gift of Time — well, I told R sometime yesterday afternoon that this was feeling like it, that this was simply not a project meant to be happen, and I should find out if McDonald’s is hiring, and he told me not to be stupid. I glared, he apologized and said what he had to say a little more politely. But the idea that I’m starting over again – this time not by choice — is… well, it doesn’t feel good. I know I can resurrect a lot. It wouldn’t be like starting at the very first word. But… maybe I’ll go watch TV for a while.
Judy, Judy, Judy said:
This happened to Jenny Crusie before. She managed to recover everything. Not sure how but she blogged about it. Maybe you could find her latest blogpost and ask her.
It sucks that this happened to you. Mine died a while ago and I haven’t been able to replace it but I did get everything I needed off of it first.
caril said:
Oh what a horrible thing to happen! It makes me sick to my stomach just thinking about your pain. please dont give up! I was reading about a cloud based authoring site. do you want me to look up the reference? With an external keyboard you probably could use your ipad. i take notes on my ohone with an external keyboard.
Maria said:
Not good. Not good at all.
I couldn’t find a contact email for you–I have a question for you about Gift of Ghosts. My email is in the details or you can find me at http://www.BearMountainBooks.com — there’s an email contact listed on the left side.
Reb said:
Sarah, if you are prepared to take the delay of sending the drives to New Zealand, my other half can rescue the files if they’re rescueable. Get in touch if you want to.
sarahwynde said:
Thank you so much for that kind offer! I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to answer — it’s taken me a while to get back online and retrieve my blog password. I’m actually kind of okay about the loss now, but I’ll write a longer blog post about that next.