Dear technology: don’t be hatin’, yo.

Last night Hikaru got to deal with one of the fun perks of living with a writer: tolerating said writer’s late-night spaz-fits as he hops in and out of bed, running to the computer over and over again to jot down a few inspired lines of ‘genius’ only to retire to bed again.

And rinse and repeat for a few hours, each time with hasty apologies and promises that it’s the last time tonight.

Last night I finally hit that spark I needed for the beginning of Shadow’s Voice. I’ve been jotting down what I can here and there, but past history and experience with how I work have shown me that I need my introductory scene settled before I can make consistent progress on the story. It helps set the tone for what I’ll be writing later. I’ve been floundering on it, and while I had a basic idea of how I wanted it to start, what I’d come up with before was lackluster and missing a certain impact despite conveying what I’d intended.

So when the perfect opening line suddenly hit me last night, seeming to crack open my skull so a font of ideas and jumbled words could pour out, I couldn’t just go to sleep and let it wait until morning. By morning I’d have forgotten it, like a half-remembered dream where I know what happens but the electric clarity is gone (much like the original intro). Three or four times I ran out of bed to jot things down, add on to what I’d written before, and overall make sure I didn’t miss a thing. Even when I fell asleep my mind was still churning through things I wanted to add, but they were smaller things I felt safe saving until morning.

So this morning I dashed out of bed and, before even starting work, added a couple of pages of notes and dialogue outlines to what I’d started last night. Happy, energetic, I saved the work and moved on to start today’s client project.

Now lately my darling laptop, the apple of my eye, my main conduit to the outside world, my obedient little mechanical lapdog, has been misbehaving badly when I ask it to print certain things. By ‘misbehaving’ I mean ‘forcing me to hard reboot after all my programs hang, terminating processes helps nothing, and it won’t reboot through standard procedures.’ I’m thinking it may be time to backup my data and just do a wipe and clean install.

That won’t bring back what I lost this morning, though.

It crashed. It crashed, and it ate everything I’d done on Shadow’s Voice this morning, despite the fact that I know I saved as I wrote. In fact, I’m entirely neurotic about that. Every other sentence, Ctrl+S. Every day I even save new versions in case I delete stuff that I might want to reference later. What I wrote this morning should have been there when I rebooted, either in an auto-recover save or in my original file.

It wasn’t. And while I managed to mostly reconstruct what I’d written, I was still not happy.

~eyes his computer~ Why don’t you love me anymore? We cleaned out the giant ball of lint in your heat sink, I brushed out your keyboard, I got you a shiny new chill mat that keeps your processor nice and cool. Why you gotta hurt the ones who love you?

…okay, I’m done being a dork.