Reflections
Occassional musings on the art, craft & life of writing.
by Joy Renee

How many ways can a writer�s tools be the implement of their work�s destruction? How many ways can a manuscript come to a bad end? Let me imagine some ways. That is what I do best--imagine. Especially potential disaster. Every advance in technology in the history of writing has increased the efficiency of the writer and thus their productivity. But what few dare dwell on is that it also increases the potential for damage and loss.

When the wielder of a stylus on a stone tablet shattered his tablet as he chiseled out the final character, he lost maybe a hundred words. He probably had them memorized by the time he got that far. When the wielder of a feather pen knocked his ink well over onto his paper, he lost possibly a thousand words. Now it�s a bit harder to imagine a way a typist could lose whole pages of work due to the malfunction or misuse of the equipment, though I suppose they could not notice the ribbon go dry while they were in the middle of a creative frenzy. Or a goat could eat the page right out of the carriage through the open window beside the desk.

But the use of typewriters increased the total number of manuscript pages. And those reams of pages could have accidents. The creek bordering the back yard floods the writer�s basement office and makes mulch of the cardboard files on the floor. The housekeeper mistakes a magnum opus for trash and tosses it in the fireplace. (That really happened to some famous philosopher who was writing before typewriters--his name escapes me at the moment.) a fire demolishes an attic office and twenty years worth of manuscripts are smoked. (That one really happened to Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison.) Or the goat feasts on the 600 page manuscript on the desk next to the typewriter.

Then came computers and word processors and oh boy do things escalate now. The floppy that has the only copy of your thirty page term paper was in the stack of fresh floppies you just formatted. You typed continuously for three hours without saving and the power company just turned off the power. The cat walks across the keyboard just as you invoke �select all�. What might you invoke next? You store all your files on your Internet site while you re-install Windows from factory disks and then discover that you also stored your only copy of your password to access the site--Where? Yep. On the site.

That last one really happened to me. September 3, 1998. Among the material locked away from me was two years of my daily journal. Stories, novels, essays and poems finished and in progress. Notes and outlines and character sketches and various writing exercises. Altogether about two million words of my own text. Enough to choke a goat. And more. Letters and e-mail both personal and to do with the business of this site. A data base and address book which I managed for a local Blind and Visually Impaired support group. A collection of URLs and commentary on their sites harvested for this site�s Resource page. My browser favorites file. Every project I was working on for this site was missing crucial parts. There was a real possibility they were gone for good. Like a whisper on the wires--gone. Along with my confidence in my tools and in myself and in the validity of my vision. Goats will eat the darnedest things!

I am pleased to say that after a fierce struggle with private demons, horned and goateed, I retrieved those last three things and confirmed my commitment to this project, determined to meet the originally planned deadline to publish the monthly update on the last day of September. That was the morning of the 21^st, nineteen days since I�d last seen my directory. Ten days until the thirtieth. I began to plan how to get it done with what I had to work with. The words in my head and the keyboard, mouse and screen. The word processor, the WYSIWYG and the browser. All the tools were in fine working order and I was still a writer. Some things even goats have no appetite for.

Then, that night I was e-mailed a miracle--a replacement password for the site where my data was stored. A few hours later I was busy counting files and folders and bytes and words. And as I looked in on certain files for the first time in months, I knew I wouldn�t let them languish alone for so long again. Nor be so miserly with ink cartridge and paper. I began to feel a greater respect for my work, for both the talent and the tools that make it possible. This time the tools just got my goat. But I got the message: Respect the tools and they will serve you reliably, respect the w#000080ork and it will belong to you willingly.