The Importance of Keeping Your Writing Safe

This story was prompted by another story I read by Cendrine Marrouat (https://vocal.media/authors/cendrine-marrouat ), titled The Danger of Only Blogging on Rented Land (https://vocal.media/journal/the-danger-of-only-blogging-on-rented-land). Her premise is that if you write on platforms such as Facebook, Vocal, Medium, and a host of others, those platforms could remove your content at any time without notice, or worse yet, completely shut down their own sites, taking your life’s work with them. Her advice is while continuing to write for other platforms, keep your work on your own blog. You’re in charge. You control the storage. Cendrine’s advice is sound, but I am taking it a step further with a tale of my own woe.

I was not a novice Internet writer in the spring of 2020 when I decided to launch a new website. I had developed, owned, operated, and written a highly successful site, www.thealzheimerspouse.com, for 8 years, amassing over 800 blogs about caregiving for my spouse with Alzheimer’s Disease. It had been 6 years since my husband’s death; I had barely written a word during those years; I felt I was ready to take on a new challenge, one that was in stark contrast to the seriousness of the Alzheimer website.

In August of 2020, my new website opened, the cornerstone of which was whimsical blogs on the absurdity of everyday life. My blogs were satirical, humorous, 100% true accounts of observations of everyday life. Everyday life events that happened to me or I observed happening to others around me. Mostly me. The blogs were well received by family, friends, and even members of my Alzheimer's website.

Although my blogs were enjoyed and eagerly anticipated each week by all who read them, acquiring new readers (readers who were not already familiar with me) required a full-time marketing job of managing Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts, which I had neither the desire nor time to do.

Also part of the website were 6 lengthy installments of a book I was planning on writing about my journey through bariatric surgery and my 100+ weight loss, as well as installments of My Widow’s Journey, another book in the works about my life as a widow. In other words, there was a LOT of material there.

At the 9 month mark, a change in my life circumstances necessitated the cessation of me working on the website. I made a temporary move out of state ( another story for another time). After taking some time to settle in, I decided to find an established platform on which to showcase my work. One with a built-in audience. Enter Vocal.

I had wisely saved all of my whimsical blogs in a Word file. Since joining Vocal, I have accessed them, edited and updated them, and submitted them. All have been approved and published. So far 20 of them, including a short story I wrote years ago that had never been published anywhere. I was on a roll. Until I decided to start to submit installments of my Weight Loss Journey.

I clicked on my website and …………….ERROR MESSAGE. NO ENTRY. It would not let me in, no matter what I did. I clicked the WordPress icon on my desktop that always took me to where every word of every piece I had ever written for the website was stored. ERROR MESSAGE. NO ENTRY.

Panic does not begin to describe what I felt. Thousands of my words now inaccessible to me. Thousands. I scoured my Word Documents for days. How could I have been so careless (stupid?) to not have stored this precious (to me) information in Word?

Okay, calm down, I told myself. Matt will fix this. Matt has been my “computer guy” for 14 years. He’s a genius. He can do, and does, anything and everything for me. He set up and hosted both websites through his own company. He patiently taught me how to work through web design software. Thanks to his tutoring, if I could get into WordPress, I would be able to extricate my work and store it in Word by myself. Except he wasn’t answering my calls or texts.

After 3 long weeks of my texting, emailing, and calling, I finally heard from him. While I was whining about losing my information, he had been in the hospital with COVID and pneumonia. His wife and 3 kids had been home……all sick with COVID. I was horrified, apologetic, and grateful to God that everyone is on the mend now.

In a matter of minutes, he fixed the website and WordPress errors, and there on my screen in WordPress were my lost stories. All of them! I felt as if I had hit the mother lode in the California Gold Rush.

As soon as I hung up the phone, I started copying and pasting. I am almost finished storing every written word into my Word Documents and the OneDrive Cloud. My next step is to purchase an external hard drive.

Cendrine was correct. Platforms can remove your content, lose your content, or close down, taking your intellectual property with them. Storing your work on your own website is a good start. But technology is fickle and finicky. You need to BACK UP, BACK UP, BACK UP. Take it from one who learned the hard way.