Please?
Those blasted monkeys have come in and done irrevocable damage to my best plans.
Problem #1
I set out to teach myself to write anywhere. I wanted to cope with large amounts of stress and still force myself to keep going. Well, that plan was based on a two week moving schedule, upon which we had a house and belongings. No, no way, no how, no deal.
Thanks pompous housing office, this is more than a little inconvenience. Goodness, it is apparently unreasonable of me to expect to see my things by Christmas though we left before Halloween.
Once the shock wore off, I figured I'd be able to get over that. I had my laptop after all, I had a good percentage of my work on it—I could do this.
This is where the flying monkeys get bored.
Set back #2
Settled into temporary housing, I figured I could pull this off, I could still complete Nano, I've been working while on the road, I'm behind but it's not horrible. Then, I contracted something my body has apparently never encountered before. I have, kind of, a lazy immune system to begin with, but I caught some kind of mutated super bug. A week of sitting up to nap between coughing fits, more decongestants than are approved of, and I'm still more akin to one of those mangy cats on the 'help the pound' commercials. Alright, I'll kick myself into superwoman mode. If I'm going to be miserable, I might as well be miserable doing what I love, right? Do you hear the monkeys cackling in the background yet? I didn't.
#3 You're kidding, really?
Well if not having my desk, my creature comforts, hell, even a microwave, while hacking up a couple chunks of lung isn't enough, what the heck lets crash the computer.
I'm upset with my space bar; we are normally on great terms, now I'm skeptical of its intentions. While attempting to find something online that I have on my big computers, I make a wrong click, anyone can do it, and well that's what I have virus protection for. Great, except that I'd stopped clicking and was in the middle of working on a freelance site starting to place a bid on a job. Well while typing happily away little did I know my laptop had apparently felt left out of the whole being sick thing. Hello, pop-up-yellow-warning message, I know you.
There is a gap between brain recognition, and stopping fingers that move at nearly 100 wpm. Well before I knew it my computer went into a meltdown which made my six-year-olds fits look like rainbows and unicorns.
Well, that was the end of that; laptop went down, and out.
I gave up for almost a week. I had my netbook, I checked my email, ordered recovery disks, watched TV, and read my kindle. It didn't help.
#4 Argh, it's all gone.
Yep, everything I've written in the last month and a half, and I've actually taken it better than I thought I would. Now, this might not have been so annoying because my husband actually had a great deal of my major projects on his external hard drive, which we brought with us. Except, guess what? Yep, you got it, that died too.
Here I sit, thousands of miles later, empty laptop, a trial version of word, and a new wireless keyboard, starting over for the moment.
Lessons learned: I love my things, I'm a creature of habit, I write better at my desk, strange couches do not make good computer chairs, and moving sucks. So if you happen to see the witch, would you put in a word and ask her to call off the monkeys?
