Hi, Gang. I realized I should have started a new discussion for this. 

There has not been a lot of traffic in this group of late, a shame, because literary writers are an odd and intriguing lot. I'd love to hear what's new with everybody. I'll start us off: 

In early September, I used Scrivener to try to make certain each chapter of my novel was thematically sound. My novel intertwines several historical threads through time, so how they resonate in each other is very important. I also found a lot of heads and tails of chapters or sections of chapters that needed tidying up as I moved things around. Hubby took Kid Detail and I was able to really focus. I got so far in just two days. You know how there are (few) times when you can really feel the flow of the story? When you know that the work is brilliant? I felt like a chariot driver deftly holding the reins in my hand.   I figured I was weeks away from completing a draft to shoot to my critique group, who are eagerly waiting a chance to read the whole thing, not pieces. Then, my computer died. Not just died, but died forever. Like a smashed hard drive. I thought I had emailed all the recent work to myself, but it seems that the docs were too long to go out before I turned off the computer. All that work, gone. 

Weeks of trying to get hard-drive retrieval, while shopping for a new/used computer, left me without all that fabulous work. Bye bye, September--followed by an October filled with a weird series of ill health, like nose bleeds and kidney stones and hospitals that, unfortunately, messed up. I am trying to put the material in Scrivener, but I'm on antibiotics that put me to sleep, so I no longer have that sense of holding the reins of the story, of driving it where I want it to go, being a master of my own work. 

Still, I keep plodding along, trying to remember what I've done. I have given each chapter a personal, thematic title, and I'm making notes for how to rewrite when I have clarity of mind again. We must keep going, no matter what, right? 

Right?