Wednesday, November 30, 2005

Find All / Replace All! Bwaha ha ha!

3605 words left to write today for NaNoWriMo, when I shall reach the 50,000 word goal.

Last night, to avoid the distractions that attempting to write at home can result in, I went to a nearby mall. This mall has a huge food court, and one section is tucked out of the way of most foot traffic.

It was in this section that I parked myself and got to writing with my laptop. Sure, it's a bit close to the Christmas Train, but it's still a good spot.

Even with the two (likely) drug dealers sitting near me and jumping up and down every 1.5 minutes to use the pay phones, it's still a good spot.

I was getting some good flow going, I was into it, my muse was whispering a steady rapid-fire stream of passable prose directly into my ear as fast as I could type it...

And this happened:

In case you don't see the pic, it's the Blue Screen of SNAFU.

Like the Blue Screen of Death but different. This one is darker and more malevolent.

If I was any less of a man, I woulda cried.

If I was any more of a man, I woulda kicked someone. Anyone.

The laptop was completely unresponsive. So I grabbed my stuff and I left.

Damn damn damn.

I forgot in the food court the comfy seating cushion I'd brought with me from home (don't snicker, them chairs is hard metal) and didn't realize it until I was in the car. Ugh. I didn't go back for it.

I got the laptop home and performed some triage. I persuaded it to reboot, and it turns out I lost virtually nothing. Perhaps two words and a quotation mark. I was fearing everything from a forever dead laptop to a corrupted and unreadable Word doc.

Since Nov 1st, I've been obsessively backing up the NaNoWriMo novel every few hours (no, not while sleeping) so at worst, I would lose a couple hours worth of work. I lost nothing!

Big sigh of relief!

So yeah, 3605 words left... Tired though.. So....Very....Tired....I wonder how many words I would gain if I did a Find/Replace for all contractions, converting them all two their full two-word form. Hmn...

Tempting, but no. I'd have to go back and fix it later.

6 comments:

  1. You're one of those people who can concentrate in the noisy confusion. I should be so lucky.

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  2. I did the same thing when my laptop died (and I mean died, completely). My book was on it, and I'd lost all of it (about 125,000 words).

    About two weeks later, I found a copy on a floppy I forgot I'd made. I'd lost about 20,000 words, but it was better than losing 125,000

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  3. You did not bring a cushion.
    No.

    This is not the man I imagine (ok, well, it is kindof). :-)

    I would have FREAKED. That my friend is one whacked out snippet of what it means to be an American writer I'm sure . . .

    what am I saying? what am I saying? i dunno if the new drugs are helping or not . . .

    hope you made it--let us all know!

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  4. Damn right, a cushion. That's what these here opposable thumbs are for, modifying my environment to suit my whim.

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  5. I got something like that TWICE the other day when I tried to install a crappy Belkin USB 2 card. The bloody thing just didn't want to play and ended up being sent back to Amazon. (Got a D-link one that works like a dream instead).

    At least I knew what the cause of my blue screens of death was and I could do something about. Importantly, apart from my photos (that are backed up onto a second hard drive), I don't have much of any importance on my machine here anyway.

    I bet you crapped yourself!

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