A Day in the Frustrating Life

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Writing is really hard, sometimes. Like when your computer thinks it's smarter than your are. My computer has been driving me crazy since I got it. It's a low-cost laptop (I'm not going to call it "cheap" for fear of offending it), with Windows 7 and Office 2010 installed. The little scroll pad has all kinds of enhanced functions that I didn't ask for. I just want a good old fashioned mouse-type thing that let's me scroll and select and maybe right click once in a while. This thing jumps back to the beginning, cuts and pastes, deletes, changes views, changes text formatting and targets long range missiles against countries I've never heard of, all while I'm just trying to type.

Earlier today I was working on a new novel when Windows decided to update and reconfigure itself without even asking me. As if it wasn't bad enough having an alien entity take over the very machine I need to get something done in the precious little time I have available, when my document came back up, thirty minutes later, an entire chapter was missing. A full day's work just gone! What the hell? I'm no rookie. I save every ten minutes and I back my work up a couple times a day (which utlimately saved me), but there's only so much I can do. Even the "recovered files" folder was empty. I managed to pull a fairly complete version of the manuscript off my thumb drive, but I'd lost over an hour's worth of work.

Of course, none of this has anything to do with what I planned to write about, which was science fiction (and I had a really great title I'll have to save for next time). Oh, well. So, how's your day going?

--Stephen P.

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