A Notice Of Hiatus.

[englishwitch]

It will be a long time before I can update any of my fic series again. ot the Alice in wonderland, Incredibles, Lilo and Stitch or any of the others. It could be weeks, maybe even months, I just don't know.

I used to write my fics on my Laptop computer. I had a nice backlog stored of chapters waiting to come online. Every Monday and sometimes on Fridays I would put a chapter of one of the fics onto AFF. But over the weekend the laptop was stolen.

Partially my own fault. I set the laptop case down, juggling a bag in one hand, a coffee in the other and a wallet to pay for a bus fare and a lot of pushing people around me and keeping up a conversation with my girlfriend it was left behind as I got on the bus. I realised two minutes later and raced back but it was too late. In the ten minutes it had taken me to relaise it was missing and get back, the thing had been taken and while it was caught on camera the police have been unable to make an ID. So unless the computer turns up some other way it's gone and everything on it too. There were no backups.

I had completed my Alice in wonderland fic, was almost done with my Incredibles, was making a start on my Lilo and Stitch and was planning my X-men. Not to mention lots of other single chapter fics I was going to work on at one time or another, I had made basic plot notes on a lot and put those in a 2write folder. All of them are now gone.

I had many serious works on there too. Notes for novels, a finished work and even half finished stories waiting to be re-written. All of that is just gone and stolen from me. Many things in both the stories and fics were thought up and written down on a spark of inspiration that may never be duplicated. I may re-write them but they won't be the same. The stuff I had on there was good, it was great. I don't tolerate bad writing. If I have a doubt it gets erased and I keep rewriting until it's something I'm happy with.

Writing was more than a hobby for me. Writing fics is how I relax, but writing itself was my way of life. Developing the chracters and the twists and turns of a great novel plot was something I loved and lived for. The only thing i'm good at. My soul went into my novels and my heart into my fics. It's not the laptop thats the problem. It can be replaced eventually. It's the fact that those works that I had created, those pieces of me were stolen. Taken with no regard or respect. Thats what hurts me the most. Yet no one seems to understand that.

So I'm going on hiatus for a while. Maybe I'll get lucky and somehow, someway the laptop will be returned to me but I'm doubting that. I need some time to get myself together, get out of this down mood I'm in and then perhaps I can think about re-writing those unpublished chapters. But for now there will be no more updates on my fics.

Regards

Englishwitch

[Guest echtrae]

Sorry to hear about it englishwitch. Hopefully you'll be back online and posting stories again soon.

The rest of us I think should probably learn a bit from this. I know I'm going to rethink my current backup strategy.

[Squallfan]

Ouch, thats gotta suck I'm thinking about getting a lap top too. I'll have to make sure to be real careful. Hope you're lucky enough to have it returned.

[EveKnight75]

I remember last year when I used to live on campus. I could leave my door open for hours without being there and know that my valuables would be perfectly safe. Even now, I can leave my laptop in the school library or the main lounging area for more than half an hour while I run errands in the building, and nothing happens to it.

I remember being astonished last year when everyone around campus was so careless about leaving their laptops and cellphones lying around. Now I understand why, and am just so thankful that people there are trustworthy. I lucked out in that department.

I really hope they catch the thief and get your laptop back. I know what it's like to be a serious writer. I'm bordering on obsessive-compulsive myself when it comes to writing, but I can't live without it. That's probably why it takes me forever to write a chapter.

I usually keep several back-ups in different places, including on my laptop, in my e-mail account, and on a CD/floppy. I tend to lose the CD/floppy the most easily (happened twice already), so I've ditched that idea. Fortunately, they were password-protected, so whoever found them can't read the documents.

This way, no matter what, I can't lose the documents as long as I remember all of the passwords. I'm good at remembering passwords, and not once have I ever needed to write them down, even though I have used up to 20 simultaneously.