Ah, technology.

First, thank you to everyone who offered their condolences on my lost words. Now that I'm a bit calmer about the whole thing (read here: have rewritten those words and moved forward in the WiP), I can happily report that this was not operator error (for the third time). Unhappily, then, the common denominator is a crappy PC, and one with a monitor that's been on the fritz for awhile now.

Me to HP support guy: My screen flickers and goes entirely black while I'm working.
HP support guy: That's a serious problem.
Me: Ya think?

Yeah, he thinks. He also thinks it'll cost about the same to fix it as it will to buy an entire new PC.
My response to all this?

Hello, Mac.

Actually, I was extremely proud of myself for not immediately throwing my PC through the window and dumping an iBook on my iCard to be paid at some future date from via an iCheck from my iPublisher. (See, Mom! Impulse control!)

Mind, I'm a bit wary about switching operating systems in the midst of scrambling to meet two deadlines in four months, but I'm more wary about losing time and work on lemon computers. But all the Mac users I know say it's a fairly intuitive switch, though they are, admitedly, serious iCult members. (But smart cult members. Cult members I respect. I might make a good cult member, too. {shrug})

And, not incidentally, there is this. Oh, Teh Shiny!

Rachel Vincent is married to her Word comments feature, but as I had to be dragged to Word kicking and screaming (from WordPerfect, which I remember with the fondness reserved for my first crush) I've always dumped my notes into a working journal. (Which is something I really need to talk a bit about in another post entirely as it's one of my most effective working tools - so don't let me forget!) But it looks like Scrivener will allow me to comment and journal, among other things, and do it all without the annoying clutter of the Word OS. Again, there's a bit of a learning curve up front, but I figure I can mess with it after I've made my word count and answered my reader mail for the day.

Anyway, those are my behind-the-scene issues for now, none too interesting, but honestly? When meeting a deadline, Not Interesting is highly underrated. I like to save the chaos for the page.