About a month ago I started thinking about my novel, which surprisingly is not a searing indictment of domestic servitude in the eighteenth century, with some hot gypsies thrown in.

On the plus side, it is quite entertaining and charming in bits. On the minus side, the plot really needs to be organized and developed a bit more. And on the really minus side, the majority of it was stored on the computer I used to start writing it eight years ago: my trusty 1991 Apple Powerbook.

Once the Powerbook's disk drive broke and trapped these files within its bowels, I broke down and got my lovely new ibook. At that time (roughly three years ago) I still had dreams of somehow hooking the two computers up together so as to transfer the files. Then I gave up, because work is hard. But I never came up with any sort of contingency plan b for saving the files.

Actually, I did, in that I had some notion of maybe retyping each section of the novel into the word processing program of my ibook, editing and revising them as I went. But that was going to be a truckload of typing, and that plan went nowhere.

So like I said, about a month ago I thought, "Self, why not just print your novel out? Your printer still works, after all." And I go to boot up my Powerbook, and it gets about halfway through the boot-up sequence before it freezes up and the screen slowly goes completely blank.

I was intensely sad and crushed for about three days, even though I remembered everything that I had written and was planning to massively revise it anyway. Then I decided to see if I could somehow find someone in the area who could salvage files from an old, broken-ass Powerbook.

The guy at the computer store I went to totally misunderstood me at first and thought that the problem was that I wanted to link a powerbook to an ibook. Then I managed to get through to him about how old the powerbook is--eleven years--and he went into shock.

him:(trying to recover and ask some sort of helpful question to get us back on track) Well, er, so who did you purchase this powerbook from?

me: Uh, some random business guy my dad knew. I don't think he'll be offering me any sort of warranty on it now.

In the end, the computer store guy gave me the number of his store's service department and told me, "Good luck!"

Luckily I decided to try to boot up one more time before I called them, and lo and behold, this time the Powerbook booted up fine. Apparently it just needed to sit there plugged in for three days before it had enough energy stored up to work.

Ecstatic, I dragged out my ancient Stylewriter printer and got to printing. Only nothing printed on the pages going through it.

me: Do ink cartridges dry up if you don't use them for three years?

mr rampy: Ya think?

So then I freaked out thinking that there was no possible way that anyone would still be manufacturing ink cartridges compatible with my old printer. Cradling the dried-up ink cartridge in a kleenex as if it were a severed finger to be reattached, I rushed over to the neighborhood Office Depot. And, of course, they had a zillion of the right kind of cartridge, and everything was a-ok except for me looking crazy holding this old ink cartridge gingerly in my hand.

At this point I'm home free, except I had forgotten how much I hated my old printer. About eight years ago, it stopped sucking paper from the paper tray into itself on its own. You had to stand there and hold its two sides together if you really wanted the paper to go under the ink jets. For a while, assiduous application of strips of masking tape stood in for my hands, but finally it broke so much that the only way to get it to print anything was to feed it page by page by hand.

And last month, I soon discovered that after three years of neglect, it had also developed a new quirk: namely that every time the paper jams, the printer reprints that page over and over and over again.

Long story short, three days, much profanity, and over 500 sheets of paper later, I had the whole novel printed out and hole-punched and organized in an official-looking binder. I feel a great sense of accomplishment, even if I know that most of it needs to be rewritten, and even if it cuts off the circulation to my legs when I try to hold it in my lap to read it.