"It Might Be the Motherboard". Also, Gorey Knows His Stuff.

[lenora_rose]

The only debate is whether the headache is from too little sleep (I tried last, night. I really did. But we were on the road until almost 10:30, what with errands desperately in need of doing.) or from sheer depression.

Sunday Night, right after I got off the internet, and before I'd written more than two lines in Word, my laptop screen suddenly went "black". It was obvious, from a bit of glow, that power was still going to it, so this wasn't me accidentally typing it into sleep mode (not impossible, but decidedly hard), or the connections between computer and screen going wonky.

Pressing ctrl-alt-del did nothing, nor did a repeat of same, nor did either pushing the power button or holding it down for multiple seconds. Nor any other obvious or obscure efforts. The fan was obviously still going, and it's been warmer than it was without overheating.

I couldn't turn it off. Fortunately, I'd already run the battery out once earlier in the evening, so it hadn't been plugged in that long. I unplugged it, read the first few chapters of KIM (Only a few weeks after I originally meant to), and, when it proved to still be running, but giving its power-low warning light, went to bed. Next morning I plugged it in to charge. But attempts to turn it on resulted in a funny noise as it tried to read the CD drive, then intemrittent whirring, as if it was trying to start and not getting there. Colin looked it over, and once he'd done what diagnosis he's capable of, he declared it could be a whole pile of things, ranging from the inexoensive to the deeply sucky.

Now, the good news: I'd copied all the current files over to the old computer just a few days before. So, since my writing production last week was in the range of deeply sucky, if the laptop is irredeemable, I only lost one short and rather crappy scene, on Raising the Storm, which is supposed to be the current big project. I can't recall if my last bout working on the latest review was before or after that, so I may or may not have an intact review, but either way, it's close.

And all the parts of the other computer are pretty much ready to be hooked back up, since I have to plug it in every time I save more files on it. And the other computer is the one with the CD burner, too.

However, I got the laptop in September. I made it my main computer a week, give or take a few days, after Viable Paradise. And I've had no other problems or warnings of trouble coming.

_________________________________________________________________

Before that, though, I was already hammering against one of those hateful writing moments. That is to say, I'd just tripped into the "Dreadful, Dreadful, DREADFUL!" phase of the novel, partly prompted by some of the writing theory that keeps cropping up online (One of matociquala's latest, in this case) sometimes causes me to second-guess whether I'm doing anything more than rehashing trite old melodramas with all the flaws people hate most in fantasy. Forcing out that last cruddy scene had been a first step on unjamming.

{digression}
(Not blaming E.Bear -- I just happen to have a broken character who gets significantly less broken before the end.

I have three braided character arcs in the story. The main character's story is about messing up enough to lose all his powers, his influence, and even his obvious place in the first part of the climax -- only to end up doing something even more important, which nobody else notices. The second arc is one of the old hoary tropes - the amnesiac learning who he was, and that his personality and intentions beforehand were very different from the person he's become -- though his reaction, in this case, is not quite so hoary. The third is the broken girl who ends up a significant power.)
{/digression}

And I'd promised myself that from this point on that once a week, I'd set aside time to work on Labyrinth, a potential but super-drafty YA project, which seems to be taking advantage of the dreadfuls to push into the fore of my mind. Sometimes letting two projects run side-by side like that can help, for me anyhow, and the dynamic between the two characters in Labyrinth is so utterly different from the ones I'm dealing with in Raising the Storm that they can't really tangle.

So now, of course, my unjamming got undone. And now I'm questioning the whole structure of the arc again -- thinking about moving one character revelation to a much earlier point, debating whether, if I do so, I can rearrange events enough to strip my M/C of everything much sooner, so that the 3/4 climax ends up the first half to the real climax.

Weird but true: This particular story has been plagued through all its drafts with a distressing amount of computer trouble. I've had almost no computer crashes, or data corruption, and none which doesn't strike *this* story worst of all. Usually at a point where I'm ripe to be derailed anyhow.

Dammit. I don't want to drop it this time. And besides, when I'm not writing, I get depressed. When I'm depressed, I don't want to write. I know the cure. And tired or not, it isn't sleep.

Comments

[tao-of-erec.livejournal.com]

Good News/Bad News
If the hard drive is crapped out then all you need to do is replace it to fix your laptop...but you will lose any data that was on the old drive.

If the hard drive is not crapped out then you can move it into another machine and recover all your data from it.

This could be as simple as replacing the battery to fix the problem. If the battery gets all messed up then it can play havoc on the system even while it is plugged in...it may be putting a load on the power systems.

[lenora-rose.livejournal.com]

The battery was mentioned as one of the possibles that's far less serious than the motherboard. But, we'll see. It sounds like it's unlikely to be the hard drive, or so Colin says.

I get along with computers, but I can't fix them -- the same way someone who likes others and is usually liked by them isn't necessarily any good as a doctor.