Research and editing over the last few weeks has been a battle of energy and time. When I have the energy to get into the writing, I don’t have the time. When I have the time, I don’t have the energy. I have been making slow progress, so it’s still good steps forward. No timelines, though -- they’re for later on. I do want to have more than a snatched couple of hours here, couple of hours there, to get in and do things. As long as those scattered hours remain the time I get, I’ll just have to make the most of what I can do with them.

In the middle of it all, I had my main writing computer take an unexpected nosedive after a system update refused to take. Hours of effort to get the system back online were wasted, and I was worried that I was going to have lost absolutely everything...

Thankfully, my backup hard drive had been quietly working away in the background over the last few months, and I had what appeared to be a perfectly good backup that was only a few hours old prior to the corrupted update. A nervous night of waiting followed as it slowly rebuilt my system but, come the next morning I had my old system back and running again. Only a couple of minor things had been forgotten when the rebuild took place, but the important thing was that I had all of my writing and archived research back.

I took the opportunity to update some of the software in my writing workflow, which I really should have done prior to attempting the system-wide update, but I had the opportunity to fix things with a relatively clean slate.