Aiiieee! Or how rely on Windows making a stressful situation worse.

[davidgillon]

So I've been psyching myself to submit to Pitchwars, whose submission window was today (actually they opened the window early, late Friday but I was relying on having 'til today to finish stuff)

This involved:
1) Finishing the latest novel draft (10 hours yesterday)
2) Switching it to submission format (6 hours today, it was taking out that blank line between every para that was a bugger)
3) Picking my 5 chosen potential mentors from the 108 on offer, which was mostly done.

And then I went to look at my analysis of the mentors, and realised that Windows had rebooted itself, and the file had never been saved. 108 mentor bios (each on their own website) to re-read through* to find the ones who would consider an Adult Urban Fantasy/Police Procedural crossover, with a deadline of Midnight EDT (5AM BST), and I didn't get to that until after midnight local.

Fortunately I only really had six mentors who would consider my MS, and one of those didn't mention SF/F, so the choice was simple, but finding them was a race.

Submission finally made at 3:30AM, and all the holiday prep I was supposed to do tonight didn't happen, so the stress roles on into tomorrow.

*And some of them were almost unreadable, this doesn't strike me as the greatest advert for their skills. There were a couple I never did work out the age range they were covering (and that's a mandatory match with your MS)

Comments

[calissa]

Sorry to hear about the stress, but what an exciting opportunity! Best of luck with it.

[davidgillon]

Thanks!

[umadoshi]

*shudders* I got stressed just thinking about it! Oh, Windows. Thank goodness you were able to get it done!

[davidgillon]

It's sort of my fault for forgetting to save, and for not rooting out the Office cd-rom so I can enable autosaving in Excel (WTF do you need the cd-roms to turn auto-save on?!?), but I loathe Microsoft's attitude of: we're just going to make your computer randomly reboot itself in the middle of the night because that makes our job easier, never mind all the work you might lose. It would actually be comparatively simple to put the updates on a delay that says something like "We need to install important updates, please select a time sometime within the next week by clicking {here}, if no time is entered the update will automatically be installed at {time} and {date>}"