About writing a novel (and that time my laptop died)

if you're not backing up your writing, do it now

For the last year, I’ve been writing a novel. I’ve written (and even published) short stories before and started and abandoned a handful of longer projects. But it’s been a long time since I wrote fiction. Over the last decade, I considered myself a journalist more than a writer. Lately that’s flipped. From the beginning, something was different about t…