Uh, A "Writing" Update

I have to start over.

It's kind of hard to believe. I finally got rid of Windows XP on my computer and switched over to Linux's Ubuntu operating system (which I'm semi-regretting, at the moment) this week. As a result, everything that was saved into the hard-drive had to be erased. That was OK, though, since I had backed up everything. But one of two things happened: either the disc I copied to was corrupted, or there's something very wrong with my CD-RW drive. Whatever it was, the end result was that when I tried to copy my files to my hard-drive again, a lot of the files got an error message saying that they could not be read. And guess which files were among the slain? That's right. The ones with the novel I was working on; the background notes, the rough draft of the opening chapter, and--this is the hardest of all--the OUTLINE for the thing that I was so proud of myself for having gotten so far on.

Yeah, I know: hard copy. Normally, I'm good with that. But in this case, I just didn't get to it. I was rather over-confident in technology and it screwed me over. It's not quite that bad, however. Before I even put down a single word, I had thought a lot of the book through. Plot, characters, scenes, the world it existed in; it's all still there in my head, I just have to put it all down again.

Now the only problem is whenever I think of it, it really hurts. All that work shot straight down the toilet.