One of the best inventions in our modern world is cloud storage. It’s aptly named, because everything in cloud storage is like that fluffy stuff in the sky that you can’t touch but seems to exist as some mysterious aura above our heads. The purpose of cloud storage is to hold cyber stuff so you can find it from anywhere. This means that if I wrote something in Abu Dhabi, I could retrieve it from Costa Rica.
Unfortunately, if I left my keys in Costa Rica, I probably couldn’t find them using cloud storage. It isn’t lost and found.
At first I was distrustful of cloud storage, which is how I found myself with stuff on more than one device and no way to retrieve them all. Now, I sign on, and there it is like magic as if, by prestidigitation, somebody pulled stuff I wrote in 2014 out of a hat.
And it’s not on paper, so the magician’s rabbit (or the dog) didn’t eat it. This means that homework can be stored on the cloud, which eliminates the excuse that the dog ate it, because writing won’t be on paper anymore.
The trees have one more thing to be grateful to the clouds for, even though they’re not the same clouds. Going digital will help the forests regrow, because we won’t use as much paper.
For authors, not using paper adds a new perspective to the craft. Looking at words onscreen is not the same as on paper, and even with new digital writing devices, it’s not the same experience while proofreading. Some devices try to replicate the experience of paper, with paper sound effects and the look of pencil or pen drawing. Submitting manuscripts is going from paper to sending PDFs via email. In the “good old days,” manuscripts came in a stack of pages in a special box, much like senate bills, only smaller. Reports used to be white papers stacked inside a folder and given eye-catching covers. One of the first things we learned in school was how to prepare a report. Now report covers are also going away.
You can also save artwork to the cloud, which frees up refrigerators from children’s artwork. This means we’re still not fully free of paper, but we are using it as backup.
I admit to missing some of the old-fashioned ways of doing things, but I have a good feeling about cloud storage and going digital. My latest device was so easy to set up, I was amazed. I took it out of the box, and within minutes, the cloud brought all my stuff to me.
And these clouds are so smart, they don’t even produce rain.
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