No, I haven’t dropped off the planet — at least not yet, thought I can’t say the thought isn’t tempting. The last year, or even year and a half, has been … strange. To go into detail would be boring and self-indulgent, so I won’t.

My fiction writing, though, has suffered; to that much I confess. Although I still write every day, I’m not writing what I truly love to write.

I got about halfway through NaNo last year and, between life’s interruptions and escalating computer problems, I just lost my momentum. I still had the hodgepodge of scenes, about 60,000 words worth, in Scrivener from the year before. That one, I’d tried writing piecemeal just to get words on the page, and wrote scenes out of order all over the place. They are still out of order all over the place. I’ve tried arranging them a few times, but keep getting sidelined.

Last year, I thought starting an entirely new project, a story that was trying to get out, would get me going again. Well, it did get me going. It just didn’t keep me going.

Sometime between the two, I gave in to Microsoft’s nag to update my Windows 8.1 laptop to 10. A perfectly good, efficient computer turned into a mass of problems after the update failed. Things got worse until, a year later, the poor thing was unusable. I wound up doing  a factory reset of Windows, which worked for a while, and then it began having different problems that led to a hardware failure.

Cutting the story short, I now quite like my new-to-me Mac Mini. It’s taken me a while to get life reinstalled, though I must say the process has actually been quite smooth. I’ve got the Mac version of Scrivener up and running, and have, in the last week or so, skimmed through both the 2015 NaNo draft, and the 2016 start. There is a tiny spark of enthusiasm growing (now that I’m not continually battling lock-ups and shut-downs). That spark led me back here, to the blog I’d nearly forgotten about.

I’m very grateful to the dear friend who generously sent me the computer he was planning (before learning of my plight) to retire to a closet. I might put that 60,000-piece puzzle-trying-to-be-a-novel together in the right order yet.

NaNo 2017, though? Maybe not.

One challenge at a time.