ALL of them.

"unable to locate"

not on c drive, not anywhere.

Freaking. It will be OK, right? Nic knows precisely how to kick the system back into line ("Drop and give me twenty, maggot!"). He set it all up in the first palce. My novels are there. I haven't just lost everything worth living for. Right?

Eep! May he drop kick it until it gives up the goods.

deborah, don't touch anything else. This smells very virusy. Do you happen to have a DSL internet connection that has you hooked up 24/7?

Fixed.

Nic fixed, from a distance, no less. We do indeed have the virus stuff firmly in place (we run a business off this computer, after all) and we just did a full scan disk. That seems to have located and slapped all the .exe files back where they were supposed to be. Novels unharmed.

I am breathing a lot less raggedly.

Connie, we have the whatever-it-is monstro xpensive virus blocker thing for the DSL connection. It's worked so far. No sign of a virus.

(edit: now that I am calmer, from earlier: Bev, re the Wyndham-Price parental unit? WOuldn't he be rather younger than Giles Senior? Because isn't Wesley at least 12 to 15 years younger than Rupert?)

BTW, Nic thinks the hypertext doc may have been created by one or more of the cats walking on the keyboard. Too damned shaming; they can create hypertext and I can't.

What was the problem? Were the .exe extentions being blocked or something?

Damn, you can take the girl out of tech support, but ...

Connie, no frellin' clue what the problem was, and in fact? The damned hypertext shortcut icon is still there, mocking me with its monkey pants.

I hate the very sight of it. Three of the four most recent additions to the household are Buffynamed (I have the two girls, silvery Buffy and coal black Wil, in my lap as we speak).So I'm looking at them thinking, huh, OK, which one of you little moggie rat bastards tried to fry my stuff? And does it make you less technodweeb than I am?

Hie thee to a back-up format, deborah. I'd accept this as one of those delicate little polite warnings the universe is not always so kind as to give.

Oh, we do; the first two novels are safely backed up onto CD. But the third one, Matty Groves, is going so fast that figuring out what the most recent backup is would be tricky. I started the damned thing five weeks ago and I have 26,000 words and 116 pages.

This is short (continuation on Needfire, just written). Is it too lyrical? I'm hoping not, because it's relevant to who and what Amanda is and has been since birth, and it's also her first sight of Rupert:

---

They led the way, Richard Giles and my mother, and I followed behind. As we moved into the dimly lit bookshop, my steps slowed, faltered, stopped altogether. I stood, ignored by the now more easily conversing adults and ignoring them as well. My head tilted to one side.

There was power in here. There was music, as well. I could hear it, an odd distant thing, a chime, a tone, a deep humming. Something in my head locked on to this, understanding that a visual also was trying to make me see it. Eyes fixed and staring, I emptied myself out until the image and the music came together.

Planets, worlds, dimensions, shuttered and then unshuttered, moving in a huge endless harmonious burst, darkness and shadow and light and all the place in between where the universe walks softly, rubbing together. The images poured in, and the music with it. It came from somewhere in the shop itself, inside this odd dark place with its blind harper hanging over the door, and the voice of eternity whispering from the volumes.

Once, twice, three times, the same note. Three times, the same hum. Always in threes. A phrase came into my mind, watching the firmament wheeling into the vast reaches of forever, for my pleasure and amusement, hearing the triads pouring like cold distant starlight into my witch's ear.

"The music of the spheres."

"What did you say?"

It took me a moment to come back, and a bit longer to realise that I had spoken aloud, and was being answered. I looked up at Richard Giles and, instead, found myself confronting a boy, not very much older than I was.

I haven't said anything about these, deborah, because I've got a mental blind spot about 1st person narrative. I like the immediacy, but sometimes it feels too immediate to me. It's not too lyrical, because all the images are clear, but it a little--dense? Overly rich? Sensory overload? Gah, I can't put it into words that explain I think it's beautiful but maybe overwhelmingly so.

That said, I'm plot's bitch. I enjoy reading other people's descriptions, but I never seem to write anything so rich myself.