8/18/10

Writing on Borrowed Time

It finally happened. I'd been writing on borrowed time, and it all came and slapped me last night, like some great tree limb conking me on the head and knocking me off my horse, a la Prince Caspian.

I got my computer this February, and it had a lovely trial version of Microsoft Office Word 2007. Thing is, you can only open it 25 times before they make you pay for it. So what did I do? What anyone would do: I've left my computer on for virtually 6 months, only turning it off in the events of Word crashes and forced Windows updates. (Mi pobre computadora...) Of course it slept at night, but, really...

Last night, after a crash that destroyed all but 1928 words of what must have been about 2500 or 3000 that I wrote yesterday, (Yes, I finally wrote WORDS! I was so happy!) I opened Word to discover that everything was now read-only. No more editing.

A helpful comment ("OpenOffice FTW!") on a facebook status (JH is now going in my acknowledgments, too) prompted me to download the program. So far, I'm far more satisfied than I was going to be with Microsoft Office Works (gag). I'll keep you updated on how it goes. At least my computer can be off every night. It's going to be so happy.

Of course, then I discovered that with the Word crash, I lost about 1000 words. Good words, too. Words I was actually rather proud of! Such witty banter between my reunited lovers! Ah!

*Sigh* And it's all gone. There's a part of me that wants to curl up and die whenever this happens (this is not the first time). I want to wonder how I can ever write it again. It's so hard to write something more than once; you lose the newness of it. But curling up and dying doesn't help the book finish. Only writing it does that. I can only console myself with the fact that God was like, "I think you can do better."

Which is both encouraging and exasperating.

Thus I shall press on. I shall keep writing and make that scene even better than it was (but, oh! I liked how it was!).

What about you? Any horrible computer woes you want to complain about? Or any advice about OpenOffice?


I feel like I'm slowly coming back to the blogosphere. Slowly, but surely. :) Now that the muses have returned, I hope for good, or at least for a while, I can become an authoress again.

3 comments:

Alex said...

Ew, hate it when my computer crashes and I lose a bunch of good stuff =/. But hey, least you got OpenOffice, which I probably should download, since I'm writing everything in Wordpad. D=
Oh, this is Alex Heuer, by the way.

Melody said...

Alex, hi!!! *waves and smiles* :) Welcome!

Well, I've been using OpenOffice halfway extensively for the past few days and am still pretty impressed. Definitely recommend the free download. :)

Alex said...

hmm well i might just have to get it then! =D