Is it art or is it Prisma?

I took a lot of photos when I was in Italy recently. It's easy to take a good pic there because there is so much beauty. Even the handles on these garage doors in Lake Como looked like works of art:

When I got back, I wanted to linger over my photographs, perhaps to hang on to the experience a little longer. So I began to play around with Prisma.

Here's one of my original photos of a street in Lake Como:

And here it is after the Prisma treatment (the process only takes a minute or so, unless thousands of people are using it at once, and then it takes a few tries to get it to load):

I'm not sure what purpose Prisma actually serves, or if any of its results will be kept in the future. (Prisma bills itself as an art photo editor "for Instagram pics and selfies," which sounds pretty temporary.) Even if this is a short-lived fling, I've enjoyed seeing my photographs in new ways.

You can see all the Prisma-ized versions of my photos on my Google Photos page, Italian Buildings Given the Prisma Treatment (they also appear as a combined group in the top graphic on this page). To see the original photos I took, pre-Prisma, see: Italian Buildings, pre-Prisma.

The omnivorous reader

In order to pursue my Goodreads challenge this year (a target of 20 books, with a self-imposed limit of books written by women), I neglected to read anything not within the confines of a book cover. Magazines piled up, one story issues remained unopened, newspapers were recycled before I unfolded them.

I love books but I am an omnivorous reader--I like to read anything, especially magazines. I wish there was something like Goodreads that would let me also note significant stories/articles*--not to get credit for it by way of a challenge, but to just remember what and who I have read.

I suppose that's what Facebook or Google+ are for--to link to articles you've read or proclaim the talents of writers you like, but I would prefer something more private and individual. There's the possibility of jotting down notes and names on index cards or even keeping a spreadsheet of everything significant I've read, but it seems like too much work--and I probably would lose track of them. There's also the Pocket app--but it lets you keep track of online articles only.

Perhaps this begs the question: must everything be noted? For me, it's not about tooting my own horn but my need for a vehicle that lets me remember who I've read and liked so that I can find other works by them, given my poor memory for names.

By the way, I didn't reach my goal of 20 books, mostly because I chose really long books this year. I read more than 6,000 words in 16.5 books. Fortunately, Goodreads allowed me to edit my goal, even on the last day of the challenge, in nearly the last hour, so that 16 suddenly became my goal and my accomplishment.

[The illustration above shows what I read. I tried to choose a mix of popular and more literary books, in addition to one on technique. It was really about the enjoyment of reading versus reading things to boast about.]


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* After I finished writing this, I looked around Goodreads and found that a few issues of one story have been listed there (including the Jim Shepard story I noted in a 2012 post). I'm not sure if the Goodreads staff has added them or if readers can add them. I'll look around and update this post accordingly...

My life on the screen

I've had a migraine headache for the past 24 hours (my first full-blown migraine ever). It goes away for a time and then seems to get re-sparked if I happen to look at the edge of a bright light, or I bend down or I look too long at a computer screen. (I am typing this now without looking up).

This has made me ponder what life would be like if I never used a computer again. Perhaps I could go back to paper/pen and typewriter for my own personal writing. But I've realized that so much of the rest of my working and social life now depends upon access to a computer screen. I edit publications that are housed only on the Internet; some of the articles I write and/or edit never even make it to paper—there remain forever virtual. And I have also been working occasionally as a substitute reference librarian—spending the majority of my time not walking amid hundreds of shelves of books, as the image suggests (or, please, shushing people), but in front of a computer screen, looking up the whereabouts of book titles and information.

Without access to a computer, I wouldn't be able to earn a wage, at least not in the way I have for the last 20 years. If this headache doesn't go away, I wonder what work remains that is untethered to a computer. I suppose I could weed plants, babysit children or clean houses—things I did in college for money or bartering deals. But I can't think of any well-paying intellectual work that doesn't involve my looking into what right now is this liquid-crystal source of pain.

How strange that so much of my life is confined to this 20-inch display—or that I think I have access to the world when I am really just sitting in my chair, moving my fingers along a small rectangular piece of plastic.

Print it out!

Elated to find a flash drive a few days ago tucked into a drawer, which contains files of some prose pieces I had never printed out and now thought were lost. But the elation was dashed when I plugged the flash drive into my MacBook and clicked on the files:

(filename) uses a file type that is blocked from opening in this version

Undaunted, I opened Microsoft Word (2011) and clicked on the filenames there. Once opened, the documents appeared like this, all across the page, row after row:

[] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] []


I thought all my pieces were all lost—at least everything I wrote pre-2007 that wasn't already on paper. Then, desperate and willing to try anything, I plugged in my old iBook, which I have never had the heart to throw away, despite its appearing to be in the throes of death the last time I plugged it in. Miraculously, at least for the time being, the iBook had healed itself. The screen was clear and visible, no keys were stuck—and, best of all, it opened up the old MS Word files without complaint. It was simply the difference between .doc and .docx—.docx, the newest version of MS Word, no longer cares to open up anything from five years past.

I opened up each file and saved it as a newer version of MS Word (able on the iBook only to take them up to .doc) and then printed them all out, page after page, until I had used up most of a printer cartridge. Sure it's pricey and maybe frivolous to print out pages of things I may yet toss. Yet the alternative is, well, nothingness.

I thought the flash drive would save everything, even if my computer died. And, these days, I rely a lot on Dropbox. But neither backup addresses the problem of evolving technology. Something saved today may not be accessible in ten or even five years.

And so my advice to anyone who writes and might want to read it tomorrow or ten years later is to PRINT IT OUT!

The question, of course, then becomes what to do with all these papers, something I haven't begun to fully answer yet...

The dream of dictation, slightly dashed

For a long time, I've had the fantasy that I can find software that will allow me to take long walks and write at the same time—a program that will convert my speech into typed words. It would be like having my own secretary/transcriber (or wife... see Tolstoy, et al.).

So I downloaded a popular dictation app for my iPod and tried it the other morning. The results are mixed (see below). While some phrases and even sentences are nearly intact (i.e., "as I write this I'm jogging with Wii fit"—true!), there is a lot of gobbledygook (i.e., I'm sure I've never spoken the word "equestrian" out loud). One big problem was the lack of punctuation. Perhaps another use for this might be to create inner dialog for mentally ill characters:

wondering if I should write something about who wants to be a man they're equestrian with the Manale for Steve's angle and also the fact that I'm doing it everyday of the Lycan I got for now as I write this I'm jogging with Wii fit actually I not writing or typing I'm dictating to something and my iPod you'll see the results after I e-mail it to myself and put it up here so the question is is it possible to ride and walk or exercise at the same time and end up with a readable text. I'm not sure it is but it sure would be great if I could walk in right same time I'd like to try to write dialogs or to speak dialogs without typing get this evening sounds like him and everything will be in my own southern accent elk characters perhaps we'll something

I later realized that I might create punctuation by simply saying "period" and "comma," etc. This worked, but it's a little awkward (and a lot like that famous Victor Borge routine). I read out loud a paragraph I'd written by hand:

Earthlings are strange Megan G-alt. Perquimans in to take a lot of time with her hair. She talked about hair and her earth here have her hair may Chun. Men seem to think about Paul's throwing and kicking and hitting. The women through their hair up and divided and shaped and Minka for sure. Women had around breasts and then didn't, the sept the fact ones. Lemon tart around in high heels and then more comfortable shoes with socks, get both expected to walk next to one another as equals,

I know that "G-alt" is actually supposed to be "thought" since that's what I had written down. But if I had taken a walk and talked out a story, I'm not sure what I would end up with if it was the only copy of it that existed later. Of course, I could use this method to come up with a surprising phrases, e.g., "Lemon tart around in high heels" might be a line in a surrealistic poem (it was actually dictated as "Women walk around in high heels").

So my dream of cheap/free dictation is slightly dashed, for now, but I'll probably use this app when I do a phone interview for work, hoping it might cut down even a slight bit on all the transcription I usually do afterwards.

Invisible words, written in the ether

My iBook has been in the throes of death for years. First, keys became stuck until their covers were discarded (thankfully, I rarely use "~"). Then Internet pages stopped loading. Finally the screen started to flash and sputter if not set at an exact 40 degree angle.

So I began to eye other Apple laptops on eBay; after a few mornings of watching bids flash by, I grew weary of the whole exercise and, on impulse, probably paid too much for an old MacBook Pro.

Although the MacBook loads Internet pages and offers an unblinking screen,  I have yet to fully adopt it. Four weeks after its purchase, all my writing from the last five years still resides in my iBook.  The writing is already backed up on flash drives and external hard disks, so I know that it can be somewhere else, but I can't bring myself to take it out and transfer it completely to another machine.

Getting rid of one machine for another always feels like a little death to me. I get a sweep of nostalgia when we've had to move to a newer, better computer. But there's something else going on here, I  finally realized. To transfer all my words in one motion through the ether somehow acknowledges that they aren't real, that they are invisible, fragile. It feels like I am ripping them from their home, the place of their birth.

I wonder if other writers feel this way? Maybe it's because I first started to write on typewriters and the words could only exist there, unquestionably tangible. Words written on a computer are more of a verb than a noun, an action frozen. They are written, typed, saved. Even when completed, they still remain more an idea than a thing. Writers who have always written on computers perhaps don't feel this need for a specific home for their words.

(The photo above reveals the one thing I've done on my MacBook--play with its Photobooth feature. Self-portrait, March 2011)

Treadmill desks: can you really exercise and write at the same time?

Suddenly I'm reading lots about treadmill desks (or vertical workstations), which allow you to write and exercise at the same time (see selected articles below*). This seemed like the perfect solution for me since exercise/writing is often an either/or choice with me and sitting in one spot for several hours gives me lower back pain.

But the smallish bedrooms of my 1960s split-level house aren't big enough to accommodate a 6'-long treadmill (unless I want to put a mattress on top of it at night). And I don't want a treadmill in the middle of my living room.

The obvious solution was to put my laptop or notebook on a higher shelf and to simply walk in place. The results? Illegible handwritten prose. A lack of control at my laptop, even after repeated tries. And the loss of the meditative state I like to be in while composing. Perhaps I could type while walking in place if all I was doing was typing.

So it looks like I am not going to join the growing number of "treadheads."

However, I've come up with a different solution that is working for me, and which cost me only the $29 for a good pedometer. I've started to walk or jog in place while doing other things, in an effort to get up to 6,000 steps a day even when I'm working inside all day. Washing my hands and brushing my teeth? 300 steps. Loading the dryer? 500 steps.

It feels a little silly to jog in place when I'm in the bathroom, but like Vegas, I figure whatever goes on in the bathroom stays in the bathroom. Sillier to jog downstairs to the laundry room, or to march in place while cooking. Yet the pedometer is an antidote to embarrassment; it keeps me moving.

It also helps that I read recently that William Shatner runs in place for 30 minutes every morning (in addition to swimming and other types of exercise). The man looks pretty dang good for 80.


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* Here are some recent articles/blog posts on treadmill writing:

• Next stop: MEGA Treadmill Desk

• Pound the Keys and Drop the Pounds (includes a funny clip from Woody Allen's "Bananas" on the prototype exercise desk—the pic above is a still from it)

• The Amazing Treadmill Desk (includes a "Good Morning America" clip on office workers on treadmills)

An unintended vacation

I haven't updated this blog in nearly two weeks, mostly because I was on vacation and, prior to that, hurriedly getting ready for Christmas. During vacation I had limited access to a computer—there were eight of us in one house vying for time on the computer. When my turn came it was always with interruptions as people walked into the bedroom/study, or usually with the feeling that someone was hovering nearby, ready to pounce on the keyboard if I even left for the bathroom.

I am sorry that we have become so tied to our computers, but I realized something important about myself: I only like to write when no one is around. Not just in an empty room but in an empty house, if possible. If that's not possible, I want to have time/room to myself with boundaries clearly demarcated. (However, I have been able to write in coffee shops, sitting by myself and intent on my work because there is no one there to interrupt me or ask me to do something for them.)

I wrote half a blog post but then couldn't finish it because the ending required that I slide into deep thought to gather my thoughts in a circular way. With people talking around me, my thoughts just kept skidding and going in obvious and superficial directions, so I gave up. I surrendered to the holiday or the idea of holiday, knowing I could make up for it later. I wrote part of a short story in my head, while trying to go to sleep at night, ready to dictate it through my willing fingers in a few days.

This recent experience has made me admire Jane Austen even more. The biography, Jane Austen, by Carol Shields, which I skimmed through last year, said that Jane would write while others conversed around her, and was quick to hide her work if anyone came into her room. She had little time for solitude. (For more, see Jane Austen paragraph in QACW). Of course, Jane Austen didn't have children and there were servants around to clean and cook. But it makes me a little sad for her that she hid her writing from her family, that it was just something she did on the side, as a hobby, and probably wasn't taken seriously at first. If she had been a man, I imagine he might have asked for and gotten time and space to himself even from the beginning. And he wouldn't have been considered an asshole for making such demands, even if he turned out to be a lousy writer.

I know this last paragraph should come to some kind of conclusion, but I have a kid here tap-dancing and talking to me about one of her Christmas presents, so I'll just have to end it where it is.

In defense of paper

At a PTA meeting I went to a couple of nights ago, some parents argued that, for ecological reasons, the PTA newsletter should no longer be printed and mailed. They argued that parents should read the newsletter online and not expect a paper copy, which costs the PTA thousands of dollars each year in printing and mailing costs. The counter-argument was that not all parents have computers and/or Internet access. So an ad hoc committee was formed that will look into providing computers to parents who don’t have them in the home. (Although, now that I think about it, I’m not sure that the energy required to manufacture, ship and run a computer is all that much ecologically better, in the long run, than printing and mailing a bi-monthly newsletter).

I receive the PTA newsletter by email because it arrives a week earlier that way, but I don’t want to receive all my news—or all the words I read—this way. The primary reason is that it hurts my neck to read at the computer for long stretches of time. And online text glows, which never feels natural to me. Stare at it too long and I start getting eyestrain and an ache in my forehead. I never had a headache in my life—or neck problems—until I started to use a computer in the late 1980s.

If everything goes online, I’m afraid readers of the future will be awkward head-jutting, Advil-popping creatures tethered to the computer screen (since that will be their only access to any kind of writing and all measures of entertainment), unable to move away since their physical misery will keep them from wanting to get up.

Of course, there are portable devices that lack the glow of a computer screen, and which you can read as you eat breakfast, but as I said in a previous post, unless the Kindle becomes so cheap I can buy it at the Dollar Store, where I buy my sunglasses, I’m not likely to own one. Leaving the paper Style section of the Washington Post behind on your Metro seat is no big deal; reading it on a Kindle and leaving the Kindle on your Metro seat is nearly tragic, given its current cost.

But beyond cost and discomfort, I would miss paper because books and magazines are more inviting to me than hyperlinks. Sure there are splashy web pages, but looking at a publication online, I miss the typical Table of Contents, being able to physically thumb through a magazine, letting things catch my eye. More than anything, I'd miss layouts—I rarely see an online layout that compares to a great two-page spread.

And, since I have chosen what comes into my home, the books and magazines I own or borrow from the library usually have more authority than whatever pops up in a Google answer. One of the best books I own is The Indoor Kitchen Garden, which I bought 20 years ago—$14.95 seemed so extravagant at the time. I used it to start an herb garden in my high-rise, no balcony apartment in D.C. and still use it to figure out what plants can go on my deck in containers. Plant by plant, it tells me how big the pot must be to provide for the roots, what the soil pH should be, etc. I’ve tried to find similar information on the Internet but when I type in “basil,” I’m given hundreds of pages, most not specific to container gardening, many written with god-knows what expertise. I can try to sift through and navigate the many possibilities on the Internet, or simply go to my bookshelf, pull down my well-worn book, and have my answer in a just a minute.

Postscript: I wrote this on my laptop a couple of days ago and uploaded it today, finally realizing the irony of complaining about reading on the Internet via a blog post that I now hope people will read on... the Internet.

Tiny tales of technology: Flash drives

The other week a writer friend took what looked to be a small, striped toiletry bag out of her leather purse, unzipped it and dumped its contents on the table. An array of flash drives poured out, in an assortment of neon colors, looking like so many flattened lipstick tubes. She said she backs up all her writing on these flash drives, color coded according to the type of writing, and carries them with her everywhere because she doesn't trust computers. 

"But what if you're mugged," I asked.

"Then I'd still have it on my computer."

"What if your house burns down the same day you're mugged?" I asked.

"Then I would be in a lot of  trouble," she replied.

This has inspired me to find a less home-based method of backup. I'm thinking of putting all my writing from all my computers and external hard drives onto one mega-flash drive and locking it up in a safety deposit box, at least until that thumb-size technology is eclipsed by something else.

Flash (in the pan) fiction?

Perhaps it was ironic—or appropriate—that I read from The Collected Stories of John Cheever during my train ride yesterday morning to a Flash Fiction seminar.

Cheever has gotten a lot of new press recently because of Cheever: A Life, the biography by Blake Bailey that was published last month. (In his review of the book, Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post pronounced Cheever "A Good Writer, Bad Man.") I wanted to revisit his stories, but the other reason I grabbed the book on the way out the door is that it's one of the few short story collections I have in a small paperback, which I can easily slip into my pocketbook.

Compared to Cheever's 23-page (and in tiny print) "Goodbye, My Brother," some of the flash and especially the micro fiction that was read at the seminar seemed like scenes from a short story, or just descriptive paragraphs. If Cheever's story can be compared to a long, handwritten letter, flash fiction would be a one-screen email message and micro fiction would be a Twitter. (I'm not sure where a blog post fits in here since it usually lacks the intention and the craft of even the shortest flash fiction).

That's not to say that I dislike flash fiction. Some of the flash fiction pieces I've read have been really powerful. And I probably would have liked what I heard yesterday morning more if I hadn't just read two long Cheever short stories. It's just that the juxtaposition was too sudden for me. I also have a sinking feeling that flash fiction may be the Twittering of literature.

With accessibility to vast stores of electronic entertainments and packaged information, and with people communicating with each other through text messages, Facebook status lines and Twitters, I think it's harder to sit down and read more than a few pages at a time. I do my best reading now when I am captive somewhere—the train, the doctor's office, waiting on a child's activity. Otherwise, I get too restless after reading a few pages, thinking there's something else I ought to do, some information or activity I might be missing out on.

I should have read Middlemarch when I was young, before everyone had computers and before I had kids; now I can't sit myself down long enough to read it. I've tried a few times, but each time, after a few pages, I say, "Oh, just get on with it..." and I put the book away again. The best I can hope for is to watch an adaptation of it on Masterpiece Theatre someday.

Its first paragraph, which begins:

MISS BROOKE had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters...

is 601 words, is about the length of most flash fiction stories, and serves mainly as a leisurely, extravagant description of Miss Brooke. It doesn't "set up the story," as writing teachers command their fiction students to do these days, except perhaps in the mention that Miss Brooke is orphaned. I can't imagine having the time to write that much detail, knowing that there would be readers eager to read every word of it.

Using a water metaphor, since Cheever's stories often have swimming, if "Goodbye, My Brother" is like swimming luxuriously across the rim of a lake, flash fiction seems more like a quick walk-in, or dip of the toe. It's the same water, the same chill temperature on the skin, the same summer day and blue sky. Is it better to try to fully describe the day, who else is swimming there, what events led to the day—or to concisely describe one intense moment there? I don't know.

Even with my misgivings about flash fiction as short-attention-span literature, I'm still interested in reading and writing it, but it would feel lazy if it's the only fiction I read and write. And I hope it's not the only fiction that will be written and read in the future.

Words lost inside a machine

The family computer crashed Saturday night. I took it to the Apple Store Monday, hoping they could revive it, but after an hour of working on it, the technician basically called it at 11 a.m.

At the end of his work, he pulled out its non-functioning hard drive and placed it in the palm of my hand. In a soft voice, like a mortician, he told me he would dispose of the shell of my old Mac Mini for me. It's hard to believe that almost all of our family information was contained in the small green, gold-specked rectangle that now fit in the palm of my hand.

I've written a previous post on the danger of relying only on digital storage. And I took my own advice, backing up most of my files on an external hard drive. But there are things I never backed up, like email. Gone are all the messages we've received in the last three years from our children's schools and teachers, from people writing us as a family. There are thank yous and inquiries that I meant to write/send but now I can't remember if I did. Only the small, brain-dead hard disk knows and it is silent, sealed in an envelope.

In the book, Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui (a book I find sometimes wise and sometimes silly), Karen Kingston says that floods and other unexpected disasters offer people "wonderful heaven-sent opportunities cocreated with their Higher Self, to give them a fresh start in life." (This passage would be wise if it hadn't been so all-encompassing. A small flood in the basement—maybe. A tsunami that wipes out a village—no.) Maybe my hard disk crash was a way to de-clutter my life of all those emails I failed to throw away, until we had over 1,000 messages in the "Sent" folder alone. 

I know that email is a temporary communication that shouldn't be held on to and that most emails should be deleted within a certain time frame. But I rarely make the time to wade through and decide what is worth keeping and what should be trashed. It's painful to get rid of traces of one's self and one's emails with friends, especially since there is almost no other kind of written communication these days. I still have a 2002 email from a friend who has since died. I can't bring myself to delete it. If it were a letter, I would place it in a box with all my other letters and it would have a definite boundary and time frame. The email gives me  false hope—if I open it, I believe I can hit "reply" and David will write me back.

What is worth keeping? I think we all must ask ourselves this question, through life transitions and moves. It's something writers particularly have to ask themselves. In another passage of her book, Kingston says clutter is "stuck energy" that can "keep you in the past" and "distract you from important things." Are my writing notebooks "stuck energy"? Are my teenage journals keeping me in the past if I rarely pull them out of the filing cabinet? Or are they material for future stories?

Trying to find paper records of things that might have been on the dead hard drive, I sifted through two drawers of old files yesterday and found scraps of paper documenting moments and emotions I had forgotten; a novel I had started that I thought had been lost in the last computer crash (which maybe should have stayed lost); letters from friends in the days before ubiquitous email; files with photocopied research for topics I had wanted to write about; and stuff I now know I no longer need. I threw some of it away but there was such a flood of emotion that came from unearthing my past that I finally had to shut the drawers and walk away. 

I am not ready to edit my life. That's probably one reason I'm not sending anything out to publishers now. I find it difficult to decide what to choose and toss. As a person, I want to think that every moment, every thought was valid. As a writer, I need to be vicious, selective. I still haven't figured out how to let the two peacefully co-exist.

The danger of not writing on paper

From childhood until early adulthood, everything I wrote was on paper. Journals, poems, love letters unsent—I kept them all in boxes and file folders, and managed to take them back and forth across the country, even though my means of transportation was bicycle, bus or plane and I lived in a series of small, rented rooms where storage space was at a minimum.

In the last couple of decades I've written almost everything on the computer and, despite living in houses with attics and closets, I haven't bothered to print most of it out. Except for letters printed once and sent off, and stories printed for submissions, the rest of it sat on a hard drive somewhere. I assumed it would always be accessible if I backed it up.

An article I read in a writer's magazine a couple of years ago warned that writers shouldn't assume their hard drives won't crash or their houses won't burn and suggested the best and cheapest means of backup would be to create an email account just for the archiving of writing. First draft, you send an email to that special account, final draft, another email, with draft status noted in the subject line.

Easy enough, I created a "beblevinsarchive" account on Yahoo and have been sending copies of my pieces to it ever since. Until yesterday, when the email bounced back with the message: "This account has been disabled or discontinued."

I checked online and got this explanation:

Your Yahoo! Mail account is no longer active.
Why is my account inactive?
Yahoo! Mail deactivated your mail account because:
• You have not logged into your mail account during the past four months

It also said "All email messages, folders, attachments and preferences have been deleted and cannot be recovered."

So, just sending messages to a Yahoo email account is not enough to keep it active. I don't even remember what I sent to the account, so some of it may be gone forever.

OK, I'll just back my writing up on some kind of external storage medium. But here's what gives me pause: I have an article I wrote years ago for a graduate journalism class, which I'd like to find again since it included an interview with Sy Syfransky, publisher of The Sun. I can't find a paper copy of it; the only copy I seem to have of it is on a floppy disk—a five-inch floppy disk which I no longer have any means of accessing.

Even if I manage to transfer that disk (via a company that does such things) to a three-inch floppy disk or a flashdrive, I wonder now how long it will be before they are outdated and equally hard to access.

Today I created an "Archive" folder on an Internet email account I check on a regular basis, to which I can send copies of my writing for storage. But I'm also going to get some boxes ready, restock the printer with ink and paper, and get ready to churn out "hard copies" of things I've written in the last decade. Maybe some of it wasn't worth saving anyway, but I'd like to be the one to make that choice, not a machine.