Feeling bookish!

‘What if the internet shut down?’

I don't mean in the sense of a temporary outage, but rather a full-blown, never-to-be-seen again, dinosaur-esque extinction?

It’s a question that momentarily crossed my mind the other day, in a rather unexpected turn of worst-case-scenario-imagining events.

Far from envisaging all the life-impacting scenarios that would inevitably ensue from cyber darkness, including the subsequent National Grid Collapse, my imagination (quite ashamedly) took a much more selfish skew…

What would happen to my writing portfolio, for example, if the digital ibis in which it exists were to somehow, just….vaporise?

What sparked this fear, initially, was reflecting on the sheer volume of digital writing that I’ve accrued over the last 7 years, and realising that its very existence (and my life’s work legacy) is entrusted solely to the ‘safe hands’ of cyberspace… perhaps mistakenly.

With no tangible evidence to show for all this brainpower, imagination and tap, tap tapping… I wondered what hope the part of me that’s inextricably woven into my work/hobby might have, in the event of a www apocalypse.

Not much… was the answer, and it prompted a book-shaped epiphany, the likes of which I’m sure every blogger has had, at some point or another.

This somewhat cliched dream of seeing ones name in *Waterstones* lights, is one that I never imagined I’d be jotting into a metaphorical ‘make it happen’ journal… but alas, there it now is, scrawled in all its *hopefully* manifesting magic!

I’m under no illusion, a writer’s work must clear a much higher bar than the blogging one, in order to qualify for hard-back status.

That said, there are no visions of multi-selling grandeur attached to this particular book-publishing ambition.

Instead, it’s purely personal, and one copy alone would surely suffice (*quickly googles 'how to self-publish on a budget.')

Above all, this book that I'm all-the-time envisaging would be a gift, of sorts, to the ‘me’ that I can very well foresee I will become, twenty or thirty years from now.

The 'me' that reads real newspapers on Sunday, who types on typewriter, practices calligraphy, and who fills her home with books in pursuit of that elusive ‘full circle’ that she hopes will one day consign screens to history!

This version of self, in her silent digital rebellion - would appreciate (nay, NEED) something tangible to hold on to from these retrospective good-old-days, when the Writing was a lifestyle….much less a memory.