Going Analog

When I was in junior high, I had a huge green trapper keeper adorned with hearts around the name of the boy I liked in eighth grade. The three ring binder held loose leaf notebook paper that was full of my silly tales of my made up heroine and her friends. I had an assortment of writing utensils tucked into the various pockets, in addition to a list of potential names for new characters (as though I needed more), charts on who had a crush on who, and I think, at one point, a sketch out of the plot (I eventually lost both).

When my aunt gave me her old word processor, the first thing I did was start to type up my story (playing with its three font options was necessary). I enjoyed it even more when I was able to transfer the file to the old computer my dad let me have (after we’d shoved it onto my tiny desk). Since then, my writing on paper has been limited to times that I couldn’t get my hands on technology to do it: in class (until the LAPTOPS FOR EVERYONE craze hit) or between customers at work (where I wrote the entirety of my 1066 comic).

Sadly, this was not the best decision. Paper can be lost or thrown away or burned in a house fire, but a laptop can crash and its data can be corrupted or it can get stolen or dropped or burned in a house fire. I lost several works, many of which I have not been able to recover.

Since the “Cloud” became a thing, I’ve been storing all of my work online. Keeping it this way has saved it from more than one computer crash. Plus, it’s much easier to collaborate with writing partners who live in different time zones.

But since there was an outage this weekend on a certain website which shall remain nameless, I’ve decided that having a physical copy of my writing is probably a good idea. You never know if the servers that store my work “on the cloud” could be burned in a house fire.

Not that I’m going to self publish my work. I just want a copy that I can hold in my hands and read it, even if it’s in my own handwriting.

And even though copying it all down is going to take a while.