And I get to see every millennial from here to Reddit telling "Cloud bro!"
I don't trust the cloud for my personal work. I didn't then, I don't now.
I've found other ways to back up and keep my work safe.
It's hard to understand that level of loss until you've experienced it. It's honestly too much to absorb at once. All the little treasures that matter to you. Your great grandfather's figurines from Japan, brought back from World War 2. Your grandfather's home movie projector with all your family's old home movies on celluloid. Books signed by your favorite authors. Costumes my wife had custom made for me. The list goes on.
And having lived in New Orleans for ten years, I know there are so many reading this that know exactly what I'm talking about. They're the ones not replying to this with "You didn't use the cloud?"
(Sorry, that was petty. But I'm not deleting it.)
That being said, as I look back on that awful day, I realize there was something else at work inside me when I went sprinting into the fire.
There was a meme that circulated afterward of me running toward a dragon.
In my mind, that became the most apt for what happened that day.
Not because I was any sort of hero that day.
What I did was selfish. It was for my work.
I wasn't rescuing a kitten or a child. I was rescuing something deeply personal that I had toiled on for years.
There was no hero that day.
(Save for the firefighters, those people are true heroes.)
The dragon was real though.
Joseph Campbell and many others have talked about how dragons were a representation in story telling of what we're afraid of, or of facing different sorts of obstacles or evil.
Throughout my life I've had my work stolen, plagiarized and shangai'd.
I've had colleagues sabotage projects. I've had agents hide auditions.
I've been publicly beaten and imprisoned by the police for protesting in favor of government support to education.
I don't know their individual motives and right now, I don't care.
(And yes, I am aware there are many others who have suffered in ways I cannot imagine.)
But that day, I drove to my home, to confront what I had hoped up till then was a small kitchen fire. When I could see the volcanic clouds of smoke looming from over a mile away, I knew I was headed toward something else entirely.
When I saw the fire, I knew everything I had ever worked for in my life was gone.
Every heirloom and treasure that had been entrusted to me by people that I will never see again was gone.
Everything. Ash.
That dragon was destroying everything I owned.
And I chose to fight.
I knew where my laptop was.
I knew all of my writing was on there and that any back up flash drives were deeper in the house.
(I don't know about you, but up till then, I never had a back up plan for my house burning down.)
So I ran. I snuck around the firefighters, and charged into the house. I could barely see. There was smoke everywhere and part of the ceiling was already collapsing.
But as I was escorted out by those brave souls who face these dragons daily I got to hold that one treasure in my arms.
Everything else was gone, but with trembling lip and tears in my eyes I got to stare that dragon in the eye and say "you didn't take this. You didn't get everything."
It's small, and I guess it doesn't make the same nice headline of "crazy novelist runs into his own burning house,", but it was the only small victory I got that day. After losing everything.
I got to steal that one thing from the dragon's clutches. It may not have made sense to a lot of people. It might have just been a fun punchline for others. But at that moment, it was all I had in the world.
