It's really bad.

Laptop stolen. Ouch. No problem though, I thought stoically as I called locksmiths and policemen. I had my external hard drive in a drawer, and they didn't take that, so I was not too worried about restoring everything to a new computer.

External hard drive? OUch. Might just as well have been a matchbox. And at least with a matchbox I could have set fire to my desk or something constructively angry. There is nothing on it - nada, zilch, not one jot of info.

I don't really know why I'm not more despairing than I am. The only saving grace, I suppose, is that I wasn't in the middle of a new book, or worse, nearly at the end of a new book which I thought I'd been carefully saving oton my posh external hard drive. I don't have a single one of my books in hard copy or any other kind of copy, but the publishers do, and my mum, to whom I send every book as soon as I've finished it. There are a few I will never see again, but I'll try not to think about those.

What I'm missing most is all the other stuff on my laptop - the non-work stuff. Photos, music, emails, emails, emails. I don't even have an address book any more, and don't tend to keep people's home addresses and phone numbers. All I've had for years is a massive contact list, and seeing as I'm always at my computer it's the easiest of communication to whizz across a quick email. And now here I am, feeling bereft, and without email addresses I can't even let my friends know.

So here's my plea: if you know me, please send me an email. either at my personal address if you know it, or via jill@writegoodstuff.co.nz. I'm going to have to start from scratch, building everything up again. And yes, backing up properly this time. There are too many lessons in this for me even to contemplate at this stage, but I do know that hearing from a few sympathetic people, and then storing their addresses, is going to make everything seem a lot better.

Whoa, back up there ...

A writer's worst nightmare. So nightmarish it's barely imagineable.

Yesterday my house was burgled. That's bad enough - strangers in the house, possessions stolen, the thought they might come back for the rest ...

The most disastrous part though - they took my laptop. My life is on there, and more to the point, every book I've ever written and quite a few ideas for books I haven't. I don't keep hard copies any more, and I can only hope that the back-up I've believed myself to be doing has actually worked. I won't know until tomorrow when some computer expert tries to move the info across for me.

This is not the first time I've been caught out by not backing-up properly, but it could very well be the most tragic.

Be warned, writer friends. It could happen to you. Be sensible, unlike me.

And if someone tries to flog you a lap-top in the Auckland region, let me know.