How Many Novels Are In A Laptop?

And how many tears are shed when a novelist's laptop breathes its last?

The Scenario:

Guild Night with my gaming friends. Voice chatting on Discord. Laughing, conversing, having a great 'ol time. Then WHAM! The whir of hard drive dies. Monitor goes black. Chat cut off. Instantaneous death. I looked to the overhead lights. They are still on. Then I remember I have battery backup for my computer. This should not have happened.

The Panic:

It's over. We had been trying to hold this laptop together with figurative duct tape for the past year. Nausea wells as I realize it's time to dish out my savings and buy a new system. I'm still cringing over the size of that check.

The New Baby:

So yesterday my husband drove to the store to pick up the laptop we chose. I felt like he was bringing home a new baby from the orphanage. I want to love it. But I'm suspicious. Will it work as wonderfully as the old one did in the good days?

In truth, I should compare it to meeting a new coworker. A coworker I will be sharing my office with. Which means nearly every waking moment for the next x number of years. Will this machine be an able writing partner?

Here she is. My new writing partner. Overpowered for gaming. She looks like a race car, don't you think?

The Tally:

At dinner last night, I got to calculating. I purchased my old system with the royalties earned from the first two books of the Falcons Saga. I wrote Books 3 and 4 on that laptop, and well, half of Book 5. That took about 4 years (of heavy writing and heavy gaming) before the old dear was worn out.

So, this made me wonder how many novels are lurking in this new laptop? Two? Three? Four? That's the fun side.

The scary side is that those unwritten novels have to sell enough for me to buy yet a new system when this one croaks. A vicious cycle. So I feel like, now, I'm writing to keep a laptop on the table. Gross.

The Question:

Anyway, I'm curious. How many stories, novels, and poems has your current system helped you write? Are you attached to your system in an emotional way, like I am?

I'm the Proud Owner of a Kindle!

Well, I officially crossed over today. It's happened at last. I now own an e-reader. It only happened because my husband's five-year anniversary for working at his present company rolled around and he got to choose his ... prize (which makes it about the most hard-won, expensive Kindle ever). None of the other options made much sense (a watch when he doesn't wear one, a briefcase when he carries a backpack, and so on), so he chose the Kindle. Though it's really his, he knows who will use it more. He's so sweet.

So now I am excited to be able to buy all the ebooks LegendFire members have written, as well as those by authors I've met at blogger and Goodreads and Smashwords. Reading them via PDF on my computer is no fun when I want to curl up in my chair and read. Now, the Kindle is not warm and fuzzy pages, but at least it's book-sized and portable. So we're good to go.

Seriously, the most expensive Kindle, ever. I had better appreciate it and get years of good use out of it. Now, where do I begin? ...

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Also, in compliance with my new posting schedule, instead of updating the novel progress daily, I'm now updating weekly:

THIS WEEK'S PROGRESS
Project: Falcons Rising
Pages Revised: 12
Pages Cut: 6.5
New Scenes: 1 (4.5 pgs)
Bad Things that Happened: Ogres stink like roadkill that's been on a hot road in summer for many days.
Good Things that Happened: Alliances are forged. Well, that might be really bad for our heroes.

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