Journal

So, on the plus side, I had a really good writing day today. Got up and did some early morning writing, then followed it up by joining Angela Slatter for our regular Write Club. Net result: about 2,000 words. A whole chapter of the novella done, plus half of the second one finished.

On the downside, I lost my USB drive on the way home. I spent a couple of hours looking for it, went back to the grocery store where it most likely slipped free of my pocket, but I didn’t have any luck tracking it down. Which means it’s time to buy a new USB and restore things from back-up.

This is the second time I’ve lost a USB in 2014 – the first time happened back in March, right on the deadline for the first Flotsam novella, when I dropped Shifty Silas the laptop USB first and snapped it in two. I’m pretty good about back-ups, so I only lost about a week and a half’s work. Unfortunately, that week and a half was time I’d taken off of work, which meant I’d spent a lot more time writing than normal, so it took me almost a month to make up what I’d lost.

This time the damage isn’t quite so bad. My last back-up was Monday morning – would have been more recent, but for a hiccup with the back-up system I intended to fix this afternoon – so the only information I’ve lost is…well, the work done on Frost, the second Flotsam novella, and a whole bunch of notes about the next Aster book.

I’m starting to wonder if this series is cursed.

If there’s one refrain writers should take to heart, it’s this: you do not back up enough. 

It doesn’t matter how often you do it, or how recently you made copies, you haven’t done it enough. Things will always go wrong when you least expect it, and your systems are only as effective as they are at the weakest point. For me, that weak point is the absence of automated systems is Thursdays, when I spend a day writing on Shifty Silas the laptop instead of the desktop, Odin, which has a back-up drive permanently attached.

So I bought an apartment. A brand-new, one-bedroom kinda thing in the inner-city of Brisbane, right next to the train line that’ll take me to work. Its…well, it’s definitely a thing. An exciting thing. A satisfying thing. A moderately, deeply terrifying thing. Take your pick, ’cause all of these things are accurate. On the list of things I expected from my life, owning property rated right up there with adopting a real life unicorn on the list of things that would never actually happen.

And yet, here I am. Sitting in a lounge room that’s essentially my lounge room, looking at the piles of partially unpacked boxes.

It doesn’t feel like home yet.

For one thing, I don’t have my routines down yet. I keep reaching for light switches that aren’t where I expect them to be. Nothing in the space triggers certain behaviours, whether it’s cooking dinner or sitting down to write or even going to bed at a specific time. I’m still getting used to the fact that I live alone once more, which is something I wanted, but takes some getting used to after two or three years of sharing a house.

I’m reworking budgets on the fly to take care of unexpected costs that come with owning your own place.

I have run out of space before running out of boxes that need unpacking, which means I’m living among the clutter while I figure out what’s staying and what’s getting thrown away.

Most importantly, however, is this: the local Chinese noodle place serves it’s takeaway in cardboard boxes. And this makes me incredibly happy.