Meltdown

I'm resurrecting this from the time I spilt tea on my keyboard.

It has been a traumatic 24 hours. I was sailing happily along with Still Life. Coming along grand, when my new laptop of four months suffered a hard drive meltdown. Had to take it into town to get it fixed. They've reassuringly told me they can do it 'cost for cost'. I have no idea what the crap that means. It's still under warranty.

Whilst I wait to hear more, I've pulled my old laptop out of retirement. Funny story there - it has no battery (a funny story I'm not actually going to recount). As such, it works well - unless the power goes out. Then I lose everything.

On top of that, the keyboard no longer works, so I have to use a USB one that's chunky as hell. Got these big, fat nineteen-eighties keys. My brain rattles in my sleep. 

Between the high probability of hitting the wrong key every second word, and the very real possibility of losing the whole manuscript to an outage void, I'm giving writing a break until the other machine is fixed. Thankfully I backed up my writing to the cloud, and my external hard drive, just before everything went tits up. 

Being a writer without a decent keyboard is some special form of torture. I can't resort to pen and pad. My handwriting is so bad I might as well throw it into the outage void.

Now really is very bad timing.

After a particularly decadent night with friends, I've also decided to quit booze and cigs until the end of the month. This article made me laugh. I'm doing pretty well at the moment. Just got achy shoulders. That's either quitting or malaria. Find out soon enough. Though Dorothy Peel and Maysie Strang are my new heroines - boozing and smoking into their 100s.

“I decided to pack in smoking when I was 103 because I got bronchitis and the doctor warned me my life was in danger!" - Dorothy Peel

An inspiration to us all.