A work in progress...3

As I mentioned in my last post, by April 19 I had written more than 55,000 words and seemed unstoppable. Then disaster struck. My laptop had a seizure, both cooling fans on the motherboard packed in and the battery burned out. For four months solid I had been usuing it on the train for up to three hours a day, then working long into the night and constantly at weekends - even just to play music - and I guess it simply said 'enough'. It cost me £400 to repair. Luckily I had saved my work on a disc.
The laptop was out of action for a month. During the enforced hiatus I did some editing and revising. When I printed out my work it looked as though it was written by a crack addict: bereft of paragraphs or indents it was a huge slab of text, 120 pages of A4, with scenes written randomly and no begining or end. I had an old desktop PC at home with a Chinese keyboard, which I began using, working long into the night and reading the pages on the train the next morning. I was making good progress and had managed to write the opening chapter, when disaster struck again. The desktop PC refused to boot up - and worse still the last thing I did was save my updates on a floppy, which had been corrupted by the crash. I lost about 5,000 words - by chance I had manage to print a hard copy of the section. If there's nothing more I hate in life it's having to do things twice. I was down to writing with a pad and pencil on the train, and thought if they are taken away from me I'll end up scrawling on the carriage walls like the Marquis de Sade in the film Quills. I got my laptop back on May 16 and restored the missing section and knocked into shape the opening three chapters and a synopsis, which I sent to the agent on Friday, June 10.