Off The Face Of The Earth

That is exactly where I have gone for the past two months about.

Off the face of the earth and down into some dark hole with no way of climbing back out.

But I did have a valid reason.

You see, about those two months ago, after up setting my Sunday Snippets for the month of November and starting to actually get on a roll and pattern of things, my computer, very suddenly and unexpectedly, crashed.

Internet explorer stopped responding with Toshiba. I could not close out of the browser. I could not get anything to respond. The screen started fizzing and flashing. Not even ctrl alt del would work to close anything out.

In the end, I had to take the battery out and force it to shut down.

And when I tried to turn it back on the next morning…

Nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

I got the Toshiba logo screen and then nothing but a blank glowing black screen. I could not do a damn thing. No mouse. No log in screen. Not a damned thing.

Again, I had to take the battery out and force it to shut down.

Countless times for weeks we tried to get it to boot up properly and once we finally got it into safe mode on some stroke of luck and we were able to back up nearly all of my files. We tried countless computer restores, and then computer restarts back to factory grade square one.

But nothing was working.

They would get up to seventy some percent and then crash and burn and stop working again.

Just when everything looked bleak and dull and it was coming down to either buying a new harddrive, or a new computer — granted this one is hardly over two years old to begin with, and I did NOT want to buy a new computer because I liked this one — we had a stroke of luck and the factory restore worked.

It seems now that everything is back up and running in working order. Though it does start up slower and run slower period, it is working once more and that’s about all I care about. Well, that and the fact we were able to save most of my files from being lost, though I did lose pictures in the end. I didn’t lose anything writing related though, thankfully. I would have died if I lost the 12 pages I wrote in my novel right before this crash happened.

I have gotten extremely lucky this time, and that’s to say the least.

I’m still terrified of using my computer though. Scared it’s suddenly going to crash again on me or it’s not going to turn back on. Every time I start it up and get that momentary blank glowing black screen before the sign in icon shows up gives me a mini heart attack and I panic. And every time it takes long to load something I’m panicking it’s not going to work. But hopefully as things still work that little fear will fade away into the backdrop and things will return to normal.

Hopefully.

Now, what did this little two month computer lapse cause?

Everything. Just about everything.

I had to drop out of NaNoWriMo just as I hit a groove in writing because I had no computer to write with. (And I never would have made it writing long hand.) I had to drop out of Sunday Snippets — except for the scheduled posts I had made right before the crash — and I couldn’t blog hop or even share my link that I had one up for that week. (Thankfully a good friend was nice enough to share my link to the group.) Obviously I haven’t written a blog post in two months and this blog has been completely silent for all of December now. I haven’t written a word of my novel since this crash and the characters have been driving me up the wall for it. Half of my to do list was unable to be accomplished without a computer (like blog hopping, making a new cover, posting something new to Wattpad, sharing my stories on Wattpad to get more noticed, etc etc.) so I’m even more behind now. And…

You see my point? This damned thing threw my whole existence out of whack.

I ended up turning into a night owl that was going to bed at 1am instead of my normal 3am-ish because I had nothing I could do. That is not okay. That is not okay for me. I was a lost, irritated, stressed, and down puppy for the past two months.

But now that spark of hope that things are going to get back on track is kindling, and I pray that this one doesn’t get snuffed out. It’s been a rough and crappy two months, but now there may be a little bit of light at the end of the tunnel. Hopefully now I can get myself back on track and pick things back up to decrease that long to do list.

And maybe just in time for the New Year.

We shall see how it goes, and I pray that I can crawl back onto the Earth and stay there this time without disappearing unexpectedly. Except, Mercury’s Retrograde is coming up next week so…

Fingers crossed. Fingers crossed.

Snippet Sunday: December 27, 2015

Welcome to Snippet Sunday on Darkling Dreams!

Where writers come together to share a few sentences (8-10) of their current project — whether it’s a recently released novel, a WIP (work in progress), or an older manuscript that’s being revived. Intended to hook readers, gather feedback and build an author’s fan base, Snippet Sunday is the FB group that does all three.

I’m back, baby! Now I know it’s been weeks since I’ve been here but I had a lot of unexpected computer problems that now seem to be fixed. (They sure as hell better be because I am not going through a scare like that again. Ever. I got super lucky this time.)

Now, because of this disaster, I am just going to continue sharing from the novel I was working on for NaNo — and had to drop out of a week and a half in because that’s when my computer crashed. Mainly, I’m just going with it for now because I need to get some sort of rhyme and reason back into my schedule here. I had actually debated about just skipping this week and next and waiting until the New Year to start fresh again, but gotta start somewhere again, right?

So, continuing on with Book 1 of the Dark Heir Chronicles from a month ago now. If you remember from that long, I was having an author crisis and realized I was changing the name of the book. I finally came to a decision on the new title: Darkness Becomes Her has now become — drum roll please! — Fated to Darkness! And I will still be using the other title down the line for a later book in the series.

Previously on Sunday Snippets: Four year old Heather had been kidnapped from her home by a woman clad in black and whisked off to another realm where she found her kidnapper wanted her to be her Heir. But not just any Heir. After being locked up and put through a ritual that has changed her and her life forever — though she does not yet know it — she has found herself in a small bare essential room with a tiny bathroom, and her new mentor has instructed her to clean herself up and be ready in ten minutes.

I’m skipping ahead a lot from the last snippet I posted back in November. Said ritual above was taken care of and Chapter 2 finished. We are now a few pages into Chapter 3 where I pick up. (Some sentences may have been creatively punctuated to try to fit the ten sentence limit. I’m way over, I know. I haven’t been here in awhile, I was excited, deal with it.)

—

The audible thunk of a bolt and lock sliding into place followed after it, sealing her in, leaving no room, or even thought, for escape.

She whimpered and wanted to stay curled up where she was. However, her fear of what the woman might do to her next had her getting up off the cot and making her way to the bench. The wooden floor was ice cold under her bare feet, the soles of them scratched up from being dragged through the forest and along rough stone floors. She winced a little at the stinging sensation it brought as she picked up the clothes and made her way into the bathroom.

The stand upon which the basin of water sat was taller than her. Luckily, there was a small stool in the corner that she could drag over and stand upon to get to the basin. With shaky limbs and a fast pounding heart, she stepped up on it and reached for the washcloth, trying to not look at her bloodstained wrists.

As she tried not to look at them, she suddenly noticed the faint black lines that were embedded into her skin — they were indeed a circle, and the lines that had been drawn inside formed a star with the top point facing towards her forearm. The mark was the same on both wrists she noticed, though she had no idea what the symbol was or what it even meant.

Truthfully, she didn’t want to know.

She tried to ignore the marks and picked up the cloth, dipping it into the water. She made a small gasp when she found it ice cold as well, a shiver running through her and goosebumbs rising along her bare skin — at least these two rooms were warmer than where she had been. She rang the excess water out of the cloth and began to dab and rub at the dried blood on her, pondering slightly how it was possible there was no cut.

Had she imagined the knife carving into her skin? But if she had, then how did there come to be blood on her. It didn’t make sense to her. And why were the symbols a faint black line just underneath her skin?

—

This story is not yet on Wattpad because it is my baby that I hope to publish one day, and if no one will publish me, I am self publishing. But it’s also not on Wattpad because it’s in first draft phases yet. So there will be no “if you wish to read more…” And I do technically have a cover made but since my little crisis in changing the title…that’s going to change now, too.

However! If you wish to read anything else that I do have finished, you can hop on over to my profile on Wattpad and check out what I have to offer. I love to hear any and all feedback on my work as well. Comments are greatly appreciated, as are the reads.

And if you’re looking for some other great snippets of fellow authors,

hop on over to Facebook and check out Snippet Sunday!