Well, my fiction writing and publishing career has pretty much come to a screeching halt with the demise of my laptop. There is a ray of hope in that someone on Facebook is supposed to be sending me an old laptop they had lying around not getting any use, but it’s looking more and more like it might have gotten lost or stolen in transit, so that ray is growing dimmer with each passing day that the mail lady doesn’t drop off a package at our door.
I suppose if we’re not going to be able to get a replacement soon, then at some point I’m going to have to install Scrivener on my husband’s desktop PC, which will require some major hard-drive cleanup beforehand, and find a way to salvage my writing files from my laptop. Fortunately, I’d gotten into the habit of backing stuff up to Dropbox, so most of my WIPs are already there.
Meanwhile, since all of my current WIPs are in dead laptop limbo (and let’s be honest — they were all already stuck in writer’s block limbo before this happened), I went ahead and started a new novel, which I intend to write longhand, at least for the first draft. I haven’t actually started drafting it yet — I’m still in the plotting and world-building stage. I don’t want to say too much about it until I’ve made significant progress on it, but right now it’s shiny and new and I’m excited to write it.
Really, I’m excited to be writing fiction again at all. I’d been pushing too hard to write as much freelance content as fast as I could, and that was sucking my energy well completely dry, leaving me exhausted and with nothing left to give my fiction. It really felt like the part of my brain that’s wired to make stuff up and tell stories just up and died.
But I’ve backed the freelancing off to a more reasonable pace and started making more time to rest and recharge. This past weekend was the first one in at least two months that I was able to take the entire weekend off from writing and give my brain (and my tortured wrists) a real break. That seems to have been all it took to revive my brain’s story center.
Ironically, I guess it’s losing my laptop that I really have to thank for this. I can only get on my husband’s PC for four or five hours a day, which is making me have to focus on getting my paid work done in less time, and leaving me more time to do the stuff that matters to me on a personal level, including writing fiction. I guess before I’d boot up my laptop after breakfast and then spend all day long making myself busy with a lot of things that didn’t really matter. So in a way, the death of my laptop has been kind of freeing.
Of course, at first I wanted to cry because I thought no laptop meant I couldn’t work on fiction at all, but then I remembered, duh, I have pens and paper and those things still work. And of course it would be super awesome if I had some fancy moleskine notebooks and a fancy pen and a cozy writing nook or a magical gazebo at the bottom of a fairy woodland like SOME authors have. But all I have is a cheap spiral and a dollar store pen and my pick of the living room sofa or the dining table. But that’ll do.