Well, the good news is that my editor loves the new version of ESTC, and is sending it along to the next step of the publishing process as well as submitting a delivery payment request.

The bad news is that my computer is dead, thanks to an embedded virus on a CD from a trusted source that initialized as soon as the CD started spinning in the drive . My virus shield caught one virus, I quarantined it, and was accepting the restart command when the shield caught another virus, but too late;the system began its reboot. And now that second virus is hanging the Windows load, and crashing the system between the XP load screen and the login screen.

My in-house tech support talked me through the first couple of options for safe restart before he left on a business trip, but nothing worked; it keeps crashing. He’s now gone and I’m left with a non-functional computer. I have a second hard drive that Jan gave me a while back, which I theoretically can put in the place of the bugged one once it’s reformatted and Windows loaded onto it… except I’ve never done that myself before. In theory I can do this, then set my original hard drive as a slave, run Windows off the new drive, and go in and run my anti-virus program on it manually, but theory and computers rarely seem to co-occupy the same level of reality. I may just wait till he’s home again on Saturday and let him do it.

In the meantime, I have my clunky twelve-year old laptop to write with, and I think the dial-up still works; I haven’t checked it in ages. (Or I could try plugging the router into it, if it even has a slot and the required innards for that.) And I can come downstairs into the basement to use HRH’s computer if necessary, which is where I am now, and I hate this mouse and this keyboard and argh.

I’m thankful I didn’t try to load Dreamweaver onto my computer any earlier than this, because if it killed my system before I’d handed the book in, I think I would have done myself an injury. As it is, this is just really, really annoying. You’ll see much less of me over the next four days, and don’t send me anything vital by email, because I won’t get it.