All along the way

It may have felt like a weird direction to go when -- in talking about feelings of peace and security -- I suddenly turned to apocalypse and house fire.

My background with years of concentration on emergency preparedness makes me likely to think about worst case scenarios anyway, but also, I have had some pretty big losses of data.

While I have a few times lost physical notes, most of my data losses have been electronic files. That has included photos, journals, screenplays, novels, and pretty much every other writing project I've ever done, as well as some notes that I had saved for future projects.

Sadly, I am still not that great about backing up data.

For some things it just ended up being okay that they were gone. I don't generally go back to old journals. The experience of going through and writing them is very important, but then I have had the experience.

That is kind of true of the photos also, except that maintaining the travel blog has also become an important part of the process. Blogging about travel makes me to go through and look over the photos critically for which ones I like best and which ones are most representative of the place. Then the blog becomes an additional record I can share. Again, a terrible apocalypse or massive server destruction might wipe them out, but I will still have had the experience of the travel and processing of the travel into a shareable form.

The internet has served as a backup for many of the other projects . The 6 page screenplays and the comic script can be found on various sites. Some short fiction has been preserved on the blog. My self-published novels can still be found on Amazon, and I could still log in and print copies if I wanted to.

The two sequels (one in each series) that I started are gone, along with all of the screenplays except one that I happened to have attached to an e-mail. 

That was a worse loss. It felt like there was no point in writing again. 

Not long after that computer crash, someone asked me if I had been writing. I said I hadn't, meaning working on anything for sale, even though there still had been some blogging and journal writing.

It was harder to admit,  because it was someone who was always telling me I was such a great writer. I had to grapple with what part of my identity that was going to be. Here's where I landed:

I don't regret anything that I have written. Those experiences, and the knowledge and feelings they unlocked were important for me. I have experienced flow writing them. I can still slip into those worlds sometimes.

It is not how I am going to make a living. In fact, when I was trying to write for profit I wrote worse, because it hurried me and added anxiety.

Maybe part of my absolute hatred of asking for money is that if I am producing something that transmits knowledge well or helps shed clarity, I don't want to charge for that. 

Maybe that is why the computer had to crash; because the fact that I was getting nowhere financially wasn't obvious enough to permanently dash my hopes. Maybe it was a hard lesson that was needed.

I don't regret that I have written.

Some of them have moments where they touched people who needed them. Since a lot of them still reside out there on the web, maybe they will do some good again.

Right now, blogging is important for me. 

I believe I will eventually write books again.

It seems more likely that they will be non-fiction, and quite clear that they will not be a source of income.

That is fine, as long as I have some kind of income. 

Beyond that, there is a lot I don't know. I know some things to work on right now, and then I believe the rest will follow.

There is one more way in which I am thinking about worst-case scenarios. One more post, and then I believe I will change the subject.