The great joy of storing your writing online is discovering you have lost some or all of your work.
Or should we say discovering the backup you system you were using failed and now you ask the question.
What if it was all deleted?
What if it is gone and you have no way to recover it?
57,983 posts in various places provides some small measure of confidence that you probably won’t lose everything and that not all of it is worth saving.
The quality of the body of work is good given the quantity but good is a relative term and some doesn’t measure up.
Even so it is a sick sort of feeling to discover you have lost material that had meaning to you.
Some suggest we ought not to worry too much because aging doesn’t have a negative impact upon writing.
Deterioration of athletic skills may mean you can’t play at the same level because your body can’t do it any more.
That is not the case with writing and sometimes aging improves it. But loss of material is still painful.
The Value Of Older Material
Older material provides opportunities to measure quality, to see ideas and thought processes as well as threads that connect stories.
Sometimes you read old letters, posts and stories and cringe because you have grown and or evolved.
And sometimes you smile because it takes you right back to favorite moments and memories.
If I wrote you a letter and I read it I can always hear my voice and oftentimes I remember that moment with startling clarity.
A girl who received a few once asked me if I wrote the same thing to other women and I said “yes.”
“Everyone of you has to share words such as you, I, the, with, yes and no.”
She thanked me for helping to make her feel special and I promised a coven tree.
On a serious note, if people compared personal letters they wouldn’t find intentional repetition of expressions of thoughts and feelings.
Letters are conversations and the way we speak with people is always a little bit different based upon the relationships we have with them as individuals.
That has always been of particular interest to me. You can always identify the voice of a writer but the inflection towards others changes.
Loss of material doesn’t remove your ability to stay drunk on writing or to produce more content and potentially better than before, but it doesn’t make you feel good either.
