Kinko's

I just picked up my 308 page manuscript from FedEx Kinko's. I love their print on demand service. I sent an email with the file to my local store at 6 last night and it was ready to pick up before closing time last night. It's like I still work in an enormous law firm where there is someone in a room full of big, white machines whose job it is to make my work product look good. And cheaper than putting such unreasonable demand on my little home HP printer. Those print cartridges are more than $100 a piece and I feel angry everytime I need to buy one.

My manuscript looks so real when it is nestled inside the brown cardboard box with my name on top.

I also reviewed my computer back up procedures last night. I met a woman in Napa Valley who had lost a manuscript of a novel despite what sounded like fairly rigorous back-up habits. So I not only copied the draft onto a removable drive, I emailed it to my own Google account, and I split it into a few chunks and saved them all as Google documents. Everyone in my family knows that in the event of a fire, they should please, please, please, put my laptop in the car right after they put the cats in their carriers (good luck!). But I get comfort in knowing there are copies of my big drafts of projects that exist somewhere on a server in Mountain View that I can hopefully get access to no matter what electronic or actual disaster comes my way.