Lost In The Dust
Most of us, as writers, have a couple of clear goals in our lives. One is to continually put arrangements of words on the page in a truly impressive order. The other would be to have those words then printed so that our (hopefully) thousands or millions of followers can easily access them.
Yet, it would appear to be a fact (certainly within my small research pool of writers) that, ...
... despite these lifelong endeavours, it often slips the mind of many of us to actually save a copy of our printed works. Not of books, of course, those we always hand out numerous copies of to family and friends far and wide. But shorter works, fact or fiction … not so much.
I’m not entirely sure why. Is it because they don’t trigger the same awe and delight? Is it because they aren’t recognised as being as worthy as a book? Because we expect to have so many larger works published in the future that they just don’t seem worth the effort? Or is it that they simply easier to forget?
I ask this question because over the past weeks I’ve been wadding through my belongings. The weird and diverse collection of boxes I stored all my worldly belongings in over seven years ago before starting my nomadic life of housesitting.
It’s a strange feeling riffling back through your life, not knowing what you’re going to find or if you’re about to come face to face with some emotionally charged memory trigger. Sadly, many of my plastic containers weren’t as resilient as the white ants and mould, but there were some wonderful surprises. One of which was two large plastic tubs full of everything I’ve ever written and had published. That find had me smiling for the rest of the day. Such is the delight of having spent years wondering exactly what I’d saved or if, in fact, I’d saved anything, only to discover I’d been way more pedantic about storing my writing than I’d ever imagined.
So I guess the main point I wanted to make in this month’s blog was… when you have something published find the time and make the effort to record it in some way. Just like you should back up your writing on an external drive, make sure you also keep a printed copy. The words might be the same on both, but the impact of seeing your work published is not. So consider taking a screen-grab of anything online, or picking up an extra copy of a paper or mag then sliding them into the plastic sleeve of a folder. Even if you store the folder at the back of the cupboard and don’t really see the point of it, believe me, one day you (or somebody else) will be extremely grateful you took those extra couple of minutes.
(Just for the record, this isn’t only my view, it’s also that of my small, but enthusiastic, research pool of writers on Twitch - those that didn’t take the extra minutes.)
