I tried. I really did. I was on vacation last week so I could visit my mom and her family for Thanksgiving, and then spend the rest of the week with Hubby to celebrate his birthday. Which reminds me.
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| Belated birthday at this point, but I still wanted to gush over how wonderful he is. <3 |
It started off well enough. I had my blog done, and Hubby made the meals that day as I worked so I didn't need to stop for long. I didn't think I was going to make up the last 20,000 words, but I thought I could put a good dent in them. Maybe close to half if I put in as much effort and time as I did for my Varekai recap.
Then it was about 5pm and time to go to writing group for three hours of writing sprints; we added an extra hour each week for NaNo.
First, Hubby helped me lug two garbage bags and one wine box full of books to the library for donation.... only to find out that they don't accept donations outside of August.
So I left my lunch-boxed dinner and laptop with the librarian as Hubby and I lugged the books back home for storage. I then made it back to the library about 10min later and headed up to writing group.
That's when it all went downhill.
I had the NaNo site up to periodically update the word count whenever I saved the file. I had my file open to just jump right back into it when I got settled, and I may have had a music player open or something since I write best when listening to music.
I settled in, plugged in my earbuds, and waited for my computer to acknowledge that I was typing. The lag was killing me. It wasn't registering at all. I then tried to close down the music player and NaNo site so I JUST had the word document up. I thought that maybe since my laptop wasn't properly connecting to the library wifi - which always lags my computer anyway - that it was slowing my whole system down.
After waiting a few minutes for my computer to "catch up" nothing happened. The programs were still open and weren't closing. I then tried good old CTRL+ALT+DELETE to try to bring up the program manager application so I could shut down the programs that way. After four attempts to bring up Program Manager, waiting about 3 minutes between each try, and the darn thing STILL wouldn't open up, I gave up and angrily closed my laptop. I felt guilty about making such a loud slamming sound with my fellow writers trying to concentrate, but no one seemed to skip a beat.
I then huffed over to the center of the room to grab a pencil and started writing in my red notebook dedicated to "Miraculous Ladybug" fanfiction. I jotted down some notes I had on a potential Akuma Villain, as well as notes on what I know I want to improve upon when I go back to revise the NaNo version of Peeping Tomcat.
The first twenty minute sprint was up and I hadn't added a single word. I had the vague startings of a new villain, and some notes on how to improve the first chapter of PT.
Everyone else chatted during the down time, but I again fought with my computer, hoping being in sleep mode for about ten minutes would be enough to kill the lag. It wasn't. I also didn't have a full twenty minutes before everyone ran out of things to talk about and we went back to writing. I continued to fight with my computer, which all but froze at this point, for another five or ten minutes before again giving up and snapping it closed; a bit softer, this time to not irritate everyone.
I scribbled down a few more ideas to kill the second twenty minute sprint. More people talked about their projects, and we welcomed a new member during our down time, and I again tried not to be too disconnected and distracted by my fussing with my laptop.
Once more we went back to writing before the twenty minute down time was up, which meant that within an hour, instead of three sprints and three down-times, we were looking at four twenty minute sprints with barely ten minutes in between.
I COULD HAVE GOTTEN SO MUCH WRITING DONE!
One of the women in the group likes to tell us how much she wrote in the twenty minute sprints, and each time she averaged about 150 words or so. I don't know if she mentally slows down to collect her thoughts before writing, or if I'm a faster typist, but I average about 500 words per sprint, so each time she called out how many she wrote I could only think of how many I COULD have written. I feel a bit guilty about that, but it is what it is.
After being at writing group for about ninety minutes and not getting ANYTHING accomplished because my laptop STILL wouldn't work, I gave up. At this point I had hard-pressed my laptop to turn it off before rebooting it. Only for it to give me some sort of "Auto Repair" program alert and then freeze during the initiation of it. My computer screen would just go blank with the mouse arrow just kind of.... there. The arrow followed my mouse movements, so that was fine, but the rest of the screen was just black. Four attempts to reboot my computer, and I got the same result each time.
Which means everything I wrote on Tuesday was gone! Over 1000 words gone.... AGAIN!
My thumbdrive wasn't staying in the USB port well enough to perpetually keep it in so I could save to both the laptop and thumbdrive each time I saved. So I had gotten into the habit of save CONSTANTLY while on the laptop, but only save to the thumbdrive at the end of the day and/or when I completed a chapter. I would then update my Google Docs file at the end of the night as well - since that's even more tedious to keep updating each time I save on my laptop - and at the end of the week I would save to a second thumbdrive.
After losing the whole novel once before, this was my new routine. I never expected my laptop - which I've only had for about 18months - was going to just DIE on me out of nowhere!
So everything I had done on Tuesday was just gone. GONE! YET AGAIN! I still had the nearly-30,000 words I wrote by the end of Monday, but nothing else. All that catching up I did, and all the catching up I could have done during writing group, was killed.
I tried to be as calm and discrete as possible as I quietly packed up my laptop and notebook, and returned the pencil to the center of the room. I was apparently very noticeable anyway, though. I had to stop my voice from shaking out of pure frustration as I told the group what was going on, how I was about to drop-kick my laptop out of the window, and that I just needed to go home before I punched a wall. They all understood my frustration, and wished me luck as I left.
My intention was to just steal Hubby's laptop to finish my story from where I left off on Monday.
Then HIS computer started acting up. Apparently HP and/or Windows 10 is all sorts of done with letting people use Chrome, because any time he tried to bring up the internet via Chrome, our preferred server, it would lag or randomly freeze the computer.
We have yet to see if the computer will behave itself if we cave and just used Window Edge....
So, my attempt to continue writing via Hubby's computer was also a bust. I couldn't even get online to post my story, Varekai recap, and November blog posts to the NaNo site to verify the word count.
I had to run to the library computers for that, but the library only allows 1hr stints at the computers, so I couldn't really use them for all the writing catch-up I needed to do.
I did manage to verify the word count of the story, and my recap, and all of the blog posts, in order to surpass the 50,000 words. yay.....
Anyway, I spent the rest of the week trying to check in on things online periodically via our smartphone - which has Hubby logged into FB, so it's not the best for me to use for that - and my 3DS; once I found it.
Not the best resources to do much with, and I can't really bring up videos, ad-intense websites, or anything like that. But it was enough to not be completely off the grid this past week.
While we did have some fun times celebrating Hubby's birthday this week, it was definitely one of those vacations you need a vacation from by the time you're done. If I was at work I could at least feel better at not being able to write or do much online.
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| Knives from the Scott Pilgrim comic books by Bryan Lee O'Malley |
I'm also hoping that the second season of Miraculous Ladybug premieres on Netflix soon. I've already watched the first half of the season thanks to YouTube and fan-subs, but I can't wait to binge the whole thing. It might help me get excited about this doomed project again, as well as better get a feel for how I should write it.
In the meantime, I'm waiting for FedEx to deliver a replacement power cable for my netbook so I can use that again. Then maybe I'll be able to take a step back and figure out what to do next for my main laptop.
As of right now, it seems that the hard drive may have gotten screwed up somehow between me writing at home on Tuesday and starting it up again in the writing group. Now I have to figure out if I just survive with my netbook until Tax Refund season again, travel back to Best Buy during the Holiday Season in order to try to get 18month financing for a good computer, just drop a little over $300 on another simple "netbook-sized" laptop, or try buying a replacement hard drive and seeing if that works.....
Joy......
The other thing to think about is if I should bother going to writing group tonight. The next one will be December 19th. Which means if I don't go tonight I will have walked out last week, and then gone two weeks without going to a meeting.
At the same time, though, I don't have anything to read..... but I could still hear what others have written and comment.... Gah, I don't know.
I'm running out of time at the library, though, so I guess I'll spend the next six hours or so debating what to do next. At least I still have my notebooks and pencils, right?
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