SquarePeg Books

Why Writing is Like a Relationship

Nightmares trend towards 2 rough category subjects – something we fear happening to ourselves or something we fear happening to a loved one.

I don’t think there is a parent out that hasn’t had at least one nightmare involving their little darling. Horrific, nasty ones  they are, too. They kind that make your heart start and your eyes  fill with tears, the kind that require you get out of bed and look in on the kids, just to be sure they are, in fact, safe.

Fear can be a good thing, though. The world is a dangerous place and precautions, within reason, should be taken. Buddy-systems. Safe-words. A talk about strangers. A martial arts class to make you feel better.

The same thing kind of goes with the writing. If something were to happen – say the house burned down – I would be DEVASTATED. All my notes, my manuscript copies, files, pictures, that obscure out-of-print book that is friggin’ impossible to find but absolutely vital in making the story work. Years of work.

*poof* Gone.

Makes you think about things, doesn’t it? How would you handle it if say, someone hacked into the cloud storage of your choice and compromised files, releasing them free on the market months before your final edits were even ready? Or something less exotic but still equally possible: A burglar in your home and steals everything technology – USB’s, portable hard drives, the laptop, the trained monkey that copies everything you write into a code even Da Vinci would get a headache from trying to crack.

Trolls. Vicious use of DMCA’s. Out-right plagiarism. Showing up naked to your own signing. Pirates. Being censored. Your book landing on a burn pile organized by some illiterate half-wit. The list goes on.

You care about your writing. You don’t want your baby to get hurt. It’s a very common thing to feel fear about that. Some of us fear more than others.

But sooner or later you’re going to have to let your baby go out and play in the big bad world.

Check out what other folks chose to blog about today. A to Z Blogging Challenge.