Deadlines, Anxiety and being Flexible

Dear Reader,

We all have our favorite writing tools, places or may be even a favorite process. For me, I live on my laptop. I do to have a desktop computer. I do everything on my laptop. I do use the appropriate precautions by using cloud services and backing up my work to an external hard drive as well, in case anything should ever happen. I recommend this type of strategy to everyone regardless of your writing tools. Have a back-up of your work somewhere, have a second back-up in case the back-up fails. Because this weekend, the “something” happened. The keyboard on my computer more or less died. Not all the keys but some very important ones, like the space bar. Kind of an important key. It would give me extra spaces or no spaces at all. So, I found a local Apple Certified repair shop and took it in to have it evaluated. It was definitely defective, good news is that because this is a common problem for the model I have, Apple will fix/replace it for free. The bad news is I had to leave my laptop over the weekend. I should have it back by Tuesday. I was planning on having a book ready for launch on the 14th. But, that is clearly not going to happen because I still have chapters left to edit. So here’s where the flexible part comes in.

I do have an iPad with an external keyboard and a very old laptop that I can use to access my files to try and continue editing. The process won’t be quite as smooth as what I am used to, but at least I can still make some progress. I am not going to rush things and so I will change my launch plans. But, I have to admit that I am having some separate anxiety from my trusty laptop.

So learn my experience. Be prepared for anything, have a good back-up plan for your work. It doesn’t hurt to have two or even three back-up versions of your work.