Mac Problems

After a rough couple of weeks, I finally felt light enough to get back to working on my novel. I worked on some editing on Saturday, then let my laptop go to sleep, as I always do. When I came back to it Sunday evening - nothing. I forced a shut down, restarted, nothing. So I packed it up, trekked to the Apple store, where they told me my hard drive was bad. They took it in, backed up as much of my data as they could (everything except my bookmarks - darn!), and replaced the hard drive. When I booted it up Tuesday night, I discovered that my network card was apparently missing, which meant I couldn't connect to the Internet to download any of the programs I use, including Scrivener, my writing program. Still no writing for me.

Let me pause to say I have my novel backed up, but because Scrivener is a Mac only program, I can't work on it on a Windows-based PC. Lesson learned - once a week I will not only back up the Scrivener files, but will also export the manuscript to a Word document.

On Wednesday, I took the Mac back to the Apple store. They had neglected to install the drivers for my network card. Fixed that, and everything appears to be working now. I decided to take this opportunity to upgrade to Leopard, finally, which took a couple of hours. So last night, still no writing. Hopefully tonight I will finally get everything back to the way it needs to be so I can get back to work.

In the meantime, I worked on an essay about my Grandma in my writing notebook. The first draft is done, and once I edit it and am happy with it I will put it up on my website (it's too long for a blog post.) So the past five days haven't been all wasted, writing-wise, just haven't made any headway on Moonlight Cafe.

And since my Mac is in upgrade limbo at the moment, I'm posting this from work on my lunch break. I've never felt so lost without technology as I have these past few days without my Mac. I have come to depend on that thing all too much all too quickly. It's wonderful when everything works, but when it doesn't, it's very frustrating.