I have been forced to make a new start for the new year – on all of my writing. While I had wanted to make a new start, and have a better year than I had in 2008, I had not planned to actually restart even my novel.
Right at the end of the year I got a virus on my laptop, the first time I have ever had a truly nasty virus on one of my computers, which did a nasty number on the poor computer. The damn thing took over the poor little laptop to the point that the computer could no longer do anything. It would boot up, then just sit there and do some process over and over apparently, trying to figure out what it was up to, but never seeming to figure it out exactly. I tried leaving it for a long time in that state, but it never seemed to catch up, so I started in safe mode and tried to work things out there. No luck. I could not get the computer to do anything.
I tried to get it to backup to last known good configuration, but it could not because one of the first things the virus did apparently was to erase all of my backup points! I could not access the Internet, CD drive, thumb drives, printer… everything was locked up tight so there was no way I could save my information and no way I could get help from the Spybot forums in correcting the error.
Finally, with nothing left to do, I reset my poor little computer to the factory specifications and have been reloading my programs and everything since then.
