The Ghost in the Machine is now simply a Ghost

Yesterday my computer died.

Those more attentive to my increasingly rare status changes on my Facebook page may have noticed that a number of days previous I had reportedly "broken" Microsoft Word. Inexplicably this key programme had failed to operate, it failed to ever open.

It seems this was the first symptom of a wider more general problem. Yesterday morning before leaving for work I tried to switch on my computer only to be confronted with a blue screen of death. Something I haven't seen since the old days when I used to mess around on my Mum's computers in school which were running Windows 98. Anyway, this message said that I was experiencing "Unmountable Boot Volume". Restarting numerous times didn't help and today Rob confirmed my fear that the problem may be the physical mechanical failure of my hard drive rather than any sort of system error or software corruption. This means its unlikely I'll be able to recover any of my files, though I hold out hope an expert may manage it.

Most of what was on my PC was backed up onto either my USB stick or my External Hard Drive. Only some photos from the last couple of weeks, some of my newer music and some random jottings would be lost. One thing that I'm grateful isn't is my PhD proposal which has been saved purely by virtue of the fact I recently e-mailed it to some members of staff and can extract it from the sent e-mail still in my hotmail account.

One of the things that HAS been lost (though maybe it can yet be saved) is a story I was working on. This is particularly annoying as I'd written some 5,000 words of it and it was the first creative project I've embarked on in some time that I honestly believed had legs. (Most of my creative projects fizzle out after the initial boom, I either get bored, realise it's rubbish or forget about it).

I'm going to start again because I think it was genuinely a good concept for a short novella and would like to take a stab at writing it in full - something I've not attempted in earnest since I shelved my dystopian science fiction epic XY which I began writing in Year 11 and reached some 50,000 words before realising most of it was tripe and I'd come back to the good bits when I knew a little bit more about literature.

Who knows whether this one will go anywhere, it's not gotten off to the most auspicious of starts but who knows, maybe this will be the one. Not the big one that makes me famous, but the one I actually finish.