I do a lot of work at home (one of the joys of being a university lecturer is that I seem to spend a lot of my own time staying on top of emails, preparing for lecturers and marking) and so I have a work issued laptop. It's a beast of a machine, weighs over six kilograms and stretches the concept of "lap" in laptop to the extreme. However, over the last eighteen months or so I've put up with toasted and crushed legs because using this laptop, when I had the opportunity, to also write my novel was preferable to hiding in the hallway where my sickly old desktop PC lives.All of that was true until this weekend when that beast of a laptop died, without warning and (at the time of writing) quite catastrophically. As well as losing the marking I'd been working on I discovered, when I checked online, that I'd also got out of the habit of backing up the novel. In fact, I'd been out of the habit for two months...So, why the happy face in the picture? Well, it's an old picture and I like it, so why not? You really don't need to see the face I pulled when the laptop failed to boot up (indeed, failed to show any signs of life at all). Also, and more importantly several good things have come out of this potential disaster...Firstly, I have finally stopped procrastinating over buying myself a netbook (specifically for writing my novel, to separate it from the same IT I use for work), which I was supposed to do when turned 40 (a dim and distant half-year ago now). So I'm actually writing this on a little ASUS EeePC 1015PX. I'm liking it very much and I'm just about used to the keyboard layout (I apologise now to the guys in PCWorld who perhaps thought, over the last few months that I might actually buy one of their machines, when in fact I was just sussing out keyboard feel on what was on offer). What amazes me is that it weighs less than just the power supply for the big work laptop and so far has been running for over six hours and claims still to have two hours left to run on its battery.Secondly, I've found (or was at least reminded of something I'd seen before) a fantastic little program called, delightfully, FocusWriter. It only takes a few seconds to start (even on the netbook) and then you're presented with a completely blank screen. No settings to fiddle with, no icons, no menus... Just a nothing, daring you to fill it up as quickly as possible. FocusWriter also has a Daily Goal setting, allowing you to pick a daily time or word count. I have decided that there's no point in picking a time (I can stare at a blank screen for 30 minutes a day no problem at all) so have opted for 500 words a day instead.Thirdly, even though a chunk of the novel is currently (and possibly permanently) lost, I have my overall plan. I know where I got to, I know where I'm going, so I'm going to carry on and if I ever get my work back, that'll be a bonus and if not, I will chalk it up to experience and write it again.So, I've decided to look upon the good rather than the bad of my current predicament, because what else can I actually do? I have my lap back, no longer superheated by high performance graphic card exhausts or crushed by six kilograms of 3-year old, no longer cutting edge gaming machine. I finally have my long promised birthday present and I've found a really nice little writing app that can nag me nicely that I haven't yet reached my word count, or pat me on the back when I exceed it.Writing is quite hard enough without looking for an excuse to throw in the towel, so I have decided not to give myself one!Until next time...John