Monday 19 November 2012

Frustrations

Be warned, this short blog contains some serious bitchin'.

Recently I've been suffering the inevitable effects of over-writing in the sense of burnout.  While I've got close to 50k written in the last month (20th to 20th) I'd hoped to be closer to 70k or even more, but computers, tiredness and general stress seem to be conspiring against me.

Today I got to work, found I only had a single class plus a test to mark so figured I could get a sly hour of writing on the clock, so to speak (don't call me a waster - I don't spend half my time forwarding joke emails like most office workers do!).  When I inserted my flash drive the computer asked me if I wanted to format it.  Huh?  Yesterday it was working fine, now for some reason it's unreadable.  Last month I dropped my laptop and broke my old flash drive, and only a very skilled mate was able to save all my info on to this, the replacement drive, an old one I've had kicking around for a while.

Seems its time to get a new one.

Since the last time I've learned my lesson to a certain extent and have been backing up my files.  All I lost this time was some updated work reports and about 3k on a novella I was working on, a Saturday morning worth of work.  I LIKED that scene.  While I'm happy enough to write it out again I don't really want to because I liked it the first time.

My NaNo project is also dying a slow death.  It never really recovered after my computer crashed while saving it on the first weekend, meaning I had to write out another 3k over again.  I seem to be having repeated hardware problems and that isn't the first time my computer has refused to save my document, instead deciding to save it as some kind of temp file and then conveniently loosing it.

In addition, I have a tick in my right eye that won't go away.

I looked online and it's not a serious problem.  The causes are -

   1 ) too much caffeine - CHECK
   2 ) too much time in front of a computer - CHECK
   3 ) too much stress - CHECK.

I guess I'm doomed to be ticked forever.

And the icing on the cake is that my books aren't selling.  After a great promo for Tube Riders I had about fifty sales over the next month and then it dropped off a cliff.  Completely.  I've had one sale in 12 days and I'm pretty sure someone I know bought that.  And that's not to mention the rest of my stuff.  I have 20 items on Amazon now - 20! - and I've sold one book in 12 days.  Is it really possible to go so invisible so quickly?

Anyway, rant over.

Yeah, I'm pretty positive about stuff in general.  Even with computer frustrations and ticks and stuff I've still written 225k in the last five months and hopefully will have another novel and two novellas published before Christmas.  I still rock - I've not yet had a review under three stars on Amazon (and that one only complained about a story being too short) yet I've had just one review for Tube Riders out of 4300 free downloads.  One.  Come on, it doesn't take that long to read ....

I'm very careful with Tube Riders 2 as well.  I can handle losing everything except that because its my literary child, but I've been backing it up online.  However, losing any writing is a pain in the ass because you just feel like the Gods of technology hate you.

Right, the rank really is over.  I'm off to eat cake and brew my fifth cup of coffee today.

CW
19 Nov 2012

P.S. Just to make myself feel happier, this is my band live yesterday.  Rock!!!


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