My laptop is now back in my hands with, apparently, all files intact. I hope to get back to writing, although I now have a new outside contract to complete before I have much writing time. I hope to have the next chapter of Beth up by the end of next week. Thanks to all that have written with encouragement during this incredibly stressful month of not having my life's work available to me.
To those that have suggested backups, I reply that I have had two external hard drives (of reputable manufacturers) fail on me in the past five years, and have lost an incredible amount of important files and documents to those failures, thus am gun shy. This experience has pointed out that I need to do something, but I don't, yet, know what that will be.