MANITOBA COMPUTER STOLEN FROM WRITING STUDIO winnipegsun.com - Winnipeg News - Stolen laptop had book stored:

Months of hard work vanished when a laptop computer was stolen from a downtown writing studio earlier this week.

Troy Bailey arrived at his rented workspace at 310 Donald St. around 6 p.m. Tuesday to find it had been ransacked along with a few other studios.

His Toshiba Satellite 2610 laptop had been stolen. and Bailey was devastated when he realized months of hard work had been lost.

The manuscript for a book of prose poetry Bailey has spent years researching and writing was on the laptop, and Bailey said he had done a lot of work on it since the last time he made a backup copy in early November.

The single father received a Manitoba Arts Council grant to work on a book about a real-life voyageur of African heritage who travelled across Canada in the early 19th century. The working title for the book is The Collective Psalms of Pierre Bonga.

Bailey has been painstakingly researching and writing the book since graduating from Red River College and the University of Winnipeg with a communications degree a few years ago.

Felt sick

He said he felt sick when he realized the manuscript -- about 160 pages in length -- was gone.

"It's just a kind of fundamental violation of your personal space. There's a sick pit in my stomach," he said, adding he will have to work off an old version of the manuscript saved on floppy disk.

"It's somewhat salvageable, but I had done quite a bit of work in the last little while that hadn't been saved on a floppy."

A Swiss army knife and about $450 worth of DVDs were also stolen, said Bailey, but he tracked down the DVDs after they were pawned at a downtown book store.

Now he's hoping someone will read about his plight and return the laptop and the manuscript saved on its hard drive -- no questions asked.

"It's been a long, long time working on this, and it's to enrich the culture of Canada, so I'm hoping they will see that it's an unusual story and get it back to me," he said.

Bailey, who works at Mountain Equipment Co-op, said the laptop can be dropped off at the cashier of the store, at the corner of Donald Street and Portage Avenue.