When you work in the arts you know that rejection is part of the game. How many submissions have you had rejected? How many times has a publisher told you it can’t seem to find that play you sent 6 months before? But when you post a blog you have to believe that cyberspace has no choice but to graciously and without judgement publish your words. Not so. I have been writing for our “Backstage Blog” for months. I don’t know when I first noticed that the blogs vanished within days (if not moments) of posting but the past two have dealt specifically with that phenomenon. When even those blogs disappeared, I thought there must be a conspiracy to block those fleeting words of wisdom and reflection that often crossed my mind and send them hurling off into outer cyberspace, wherever that may be. But, alas, it was nothing more than a mis-direction by the Webhost… nothing that couldn’t be easily fixed…and how sorry that the posts were nowhere to be found. As a writer one knows that rejection is one thing, but losing your words altogether strikes a blow that
is difficult to accept… like a painter whose works are lost in a fire or a composer whose notes are blown off the music stand and out the window into the streets to be scattered in the rain gutter and swept into the sewer. I realize that my blogs are not the works of Shakespeare but they are my words and now they are lost for eternity, rejected by some mainframe that can record every word that has ever been written but found some sort of loophole to reject mine. It’s a lesson for every writer to back up your work. Do not rely on your computer, the cloud, your webhost or WordPress. The technological powers that be are not beyond rejection. Mark my words!