Jeez, the curse continues. Although I think this one may just be tiredness. Maybe travelling on 4 hours of sleep wasn’t the best idea — at age 52, I don’t bounce back nearly as fast as I used to.
So what happened? Well, as I said earlier, I had a nicely productive stretch on the flight from Chicago to SFO, drafting about half a story on Kevin’s borrowed old laptop. (For reference, I haven’t gotten myself to write fiction since, oh, I think before the semester started? Gah.) I felt well pleased.
And then SOMEHOW, I managed to leave Kev’s laptop in the seat back pocket when de-planing, and didn’t realize it until I’d made it all the way to Alex’s place, and was settling down to work.
I felt like SUCH a dummkopf. How many times have we told the children to make sure they had all their devices before getting off the plane???
But all’s well that ends well — I filed a lost item report with United (very simple online form), and a few hours later, they texted to say that they’d found it, and could either ship it to me or hold it for pickup. Since I’m coming back to the airport on Friday to meet Kev and the kids, pickup will work fine.
And luckily, Alex had a tablet + keyboard he could loan me. It’s a little tricky to work on, because it’s not a Mac and it’s hyper-sensitive and I keep clicking on the wrong things and it freezes up or does strange things, but nonetheless, I managed to draft the second half of the story. So overall, a good day, despite computer nonsense continuing.
And Apple just texted to say that my screen repair is complete and they’re shipping my laptop to my mother-in-law’s home on Thursday, so soon I will be able to work on my own baby in peace.
I’ll be able to put the two halves of the story together on Friday, and then hopefully do a revision pass over the next week, before sending it to my workshop. It’s a sequel to “Expulsion,” and I think I like it.
We’ll see how I feel about it in a few days. I’m still in that heady moment of “I actually finished drafting a story, finally, I am a WRITING GOD.” I’ll come back down to earth shortly, I promise.
