In the immortal word of comic strip character Cathy: ACK!

Tech woes (bad disc controller scrambling my hard drive) are making my life the nightmare I can't wake up from. Every fix I try just makes things worse. sigh.
1] I am not dead,
2] I have not stopped writing 'Secondhand Life' or 'Summer of Love' (even though everything I have written is on a seemingly unrecoverable drive).
If it's any consolation - it not just destroyed my manuscripts, it also nuked my tax returns. :-(
Thank the universe for BCTS. I am actually pulling down what I've already posted to rebuild the story on my own desktop and will try to recreate what I had written but not yet posted from memory. (sigh)
It may still be a while. My current state of mind is just to finish the whole darned thing offline and post the rest in a massive upload so that there's no room for Murphy's law to intervene.
Although I reserve the right to change my mind if something just seems too juicy and my self restraint falters. :-P
If you've given up on the stories, I understand. I would have done the same. But I am determined to finish these one way or another, even if no one cares. I knew going in where the characters would end up - even if all the steps in between were as much of a surprise to me as any other reader. (Thank you muse) I am determined to "take them home".
I will not leave my characters - or any tenacious readers - stranded.
That said, maybe it would be best to wait for me to post the final chapter before investing in either story again. Every time I smugly think I'm riding the tiger, I find the tiger is riding me. :-(

K@