.

They weren't able to recover any of my data.

The good news is, they are going to refund the money I put down for data recovery, so (even if I probably shouldn't) I'm going to consider that as Money Already Spent and use it for a new computer. And a big external hard drive to set up for automated backups.

The bad news is, well, everything else.

For the writing, I'm going to go forward and finish the book as if the words I lost were behind me already, and go back for them when I'm done, because I know that I cannot handle rewriting them now. I guess I should go back to my earlier backup and sketch out the scenes that happened in the bits I lost, while I still remember them. And let's just say I'm going to hit my deadline because it's kind of possible.

(no subject)

Thanks to everyone for sympathy and good wishes. Your support means a lot to me, for reals -- there's a part of me that thinks I'm silly for making a big deal out of 1s and 0s, and just knowing that I'm not alone here is a big thing.

I've been trying to prepare myself for this all week, and I've progressed all the way through "acceptance" and to "Hey, my new computer just shipped" (yes, really -- a 10" screen is fine for writing but not so great for revising, when it really helps to be able to look at two documents side by side). So I'm mostly okay, though occasionally despairing at the amount of work in front of me.

I think the thing is that I've been so anxious up until now thinking, How much work am I going to do on this book only to find out that it still doesn't work? -- which, after two years and four drafts is probably a fair worry. And right now, for whatever reason, there's less of that and more of Hey this is going to be AWESOME. And if I can really believe that then I am prepared to do any amount of work to make it so. (I did not know it at the time, but I think much of the ruminating about power that I was doing at WisCon and post-WisCon was trying to figure out what I wanted this book to do, and now ...at the risk of jinxing myself... I'm a lot closer to that.)