A Short Walk Down (Writing) Memory Lane

Even though I am perfectly well aware that such things as "time" and calendars are arbitrary human constructs, I typically just can't help but looking at "new" things to deal with whenever a new month rolls over.

And here we are: It's the 1st of February!

Red rocks near Sedona, Arizona

After my computer took a nosedive in early December and I was working on my aging laptop for over five weeks, I vowed to get myself together and move all my writing, photographs and significant documents to the cloud. In this case, in the form of our Microsoft OneDrive "Family" account which we have in order to be able to use the Microsoft Office apps.

Yeah, I know, there were perfectly serviceable open source alternatives... but the problem is, a number of businesses and editing connections I work with require work to be done in such a way they don't get the dreaded "some formatting might be lost" message when looking at a document.

But I digress.

Oak Creek, Arizona

Over the past 30 days or so, I have gradually been moving my "stuff" to the cloud.

In doing so, I have come to revisit a lot of "old" stuff — both images and text — that I have repeatedly transferred from older computers to newer, over the years.

It makes me glad that I decided to undertake this massive project (an estimated 116 GB of data, all told) as I came to realize (for example) that I could have lost the only copies of many of our early travel photos from all over the place.

There has also been a lot of my early writing, from web sites that are long defunct. It's funny to read that old stuff... not only to observe how my writing has changed with time, but to observe how "appropriate web content" has changed over 25 years or so.

Sedona red rocks at sunset

Of course, much of this stuff is basically garbage by my current standards, but I have also been occasionally surprised by how good some of the articles I created for online 'zines have been!

All in all, the process has underscored that I am definitely "a writer," even though I may never have published a book, and I was never a journalist or much of a magazine contributor.

Perhaps one of the more interesting things I have "faced" is the realization that I used to have a lot more energy and drive than I do now! At one time, I actively kept up with a full time job that had nothing to do with writing, while also maintaining 14(!) different blogs of my own, writing articles for several weekly online publications, and being a free-lance technical writer.

Of course, I eventually gave up, as I came to realize that no matter how hard I worked it was never enough to actually constitute "a living."

Oak Creek, Arizona

I think I persisted as long as I did mostly out of stubbornness; I wanted to prove to my parents — who discouraged my desires to be a writer — that writing was not a path to poverty and destitution. Well, they were right... but I had fun trying, anyway!

And so, now all my old writing — along with about 78,000 photographs — resides safely in the cloud, so a broken computer will not be the threat to their existence. And there's something comforting about that...

It's amazing, though, how fleeting the life of most online really is. When I started this gig — in 1998-99 — the important thing was always to create "evergreen" content... things people could read ten years later, and it would still be relevant and current. These days, it doesn't seem like the term "evergreen" even means anything, anymore...

Thanks for reading, and have a great week!

How about YOU? Are you a writer? Or are you more of a "casual" content creator? Do you save your old work? Or do you just publish and move on to the next thing? Give me a shout back... Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!

(All text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is ORIGINAL CONTENT, created expressly for this platform — NOT A CROSSPOST!!!)
Created at 20210201 22:01 PST
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