Save Point

My shiny new laptop has remained to me a very shiny and lovely thing since I first bought it some months back. Having written a whole NaNoWriMo novel on a tiny netbook with accompanying tiny keyboard some months earlier it has been a delight to be tip-tapping away on something not so reminiscent of a child’s toy. But the night before last my affection for this collection of synthetic materials failed and it turned on me and punished me for daring to have such faith in it. The writing has been a little hard of late, my sporadic sessions rarely bearing more than a couple of hundred words of fruit.

Friday night was a real low point, with a night in the house by myself (and therefore perfect writing conditions) leading to a very paltry 50 word haul. Mind you, I was actually pretty happy with those 50 words, so it wasn’t all bad. Then last night, like a light, I sat down in my new writing environment and 700 words came tumbling out of me. It was bliss, the kind of writing experience that you hope for every single day, where your characters seem to be talking amongst themselves rather than you prodding them with a stick. I came to the end of a chapter, chirruped my success on Twitter and went to start a new chapter, full of enthusiasm and hope at what might be achieved.

At which point the computer froze. We’ve all been there, I’m sure. Those thirty seconds of staring blankly, willing it to somehow unfreeze, which it never does. Then a minute of fervently tapping away at every single key and hacking away at cntrl-alt-del with a wild abandon you’d never normally dare muster. Then finally, blank acceptance and holding down the power key and rebooting with crossed fingers. I sat and rebooted calmly, serenely assuring myself that Open Office’s data recovery would kick in, or that I had pressed save after all. Of course neither of those were true. The auto-recovery opened, then squawked an error message, then gave me back the same document I had opened earlier, unadorned by any of the words I had mustered earlier. There were very nearly tears. There were certainly expletives.

I’ve been here before. Some years back, when internet in the home was a distant dream and laptops were barely functioning copies of their desktop brethren, I entered my first NaNoWrimo contest, and spent thirty days furiously hammering out an odd little tale of psychic children and psychotic farm hands. By the end of the month I had not only my first ever completed longform story, but also the first draft of a novel that I thought was quite promising. I had composed the whole thing on my then girlfriend’s aunt’s laptop, which ran so slowly that you had to turn it on and then go make a hot drink while it booted up. Looking back I imagine that my novel was probably not as good as I thought, but it wasn’t terrible, either. Not that I can tell anymore. The laptop died before I could muster the enthusiasm to get back and re-draft, and in those pre-internet days I didn’t have a single back-up copy of it anywhere. 50,000 words, all gone. It still hurts.

Seeing my words go up in smoke this week, I could easily have given up and headed downstairs to watch Boardwalk Empire, but I grew strong. I was pretty pleased with what had come out last time and knew that if I walked away that whole scene would be gone forever. The dialogue and feel of the scene were still fresh in my mind, and given a day’s distance I wouldn’t have the same feel in my head. So I picked up right where I had before. The pleasant surprise was that half an hour later I had the whole thing back down on paper, perhaps even marginally better than the last attempt. Sure, I had written 1500 words and ended up with 700, but actually I had a pretty good bit of productivity under my belt now. But once I was done, I made damn sure I hit the save button.