Last week I realized the reason why I kept on losing my writing work.  I’m a big fan of running libre software on my desktop.  While I can’t do so comfortably at work, but at home I run Linux desktop exclusively.  (Except to play the occasional Windows-only video game.)  So I use OpenOffice for my word processing and hence writing.  And I’m a big fan of using Open Document Formats.  However working on ODTs (essentially ZIP archives with ODF XML files inside) from a USB flash drive is not the way to go.  I guess the amount of saving and writing to disk, doesn’t help with prolonging the life of the flash memory.  So I had to change my workflow to use Dropbox instead.  I don’t want to wrangle with corrupt ODT files.  To make a long story short, I had to do some lengthy rewrites which didn’t help with moving forward in my novel.  However that has all been resolved, and I can say that I’m making good progress on the first chapter.