"There goes my clothes, photos, movies, video games, etc. But, hey! At least I saved my body of work.

We had a little incident in our building which provided a lot of smoke, alarms, and then need to grab and go, just in case there was a flame behind it. Everything is fine, we were back in the building within an hour after a crowd of very familiar fire people said everything was all good (we get a lot of false alarms). It did, however, enlighten me to the one thing I would save if I could: my writing.

Obviously, I would save my husband too, but since he’s an able-bodied, self-sufficient guy (most of the time) I wasn’t worried about leaving him behind. But in the minute we had to grab our stuff and go, my only concern was to get my writing. I have a thumb drive I keep on my key chain that has all my writing efforts on it, so I didn’t need my laptop, but I did grab my binder of edits. Had I not just been working on them, I probably wouldn’t have given it a second though, but my writing is irreplaceable.

It gives you perspective as to how much you value your own work. Do I back it up five ways to Sunday? Yes, every chance I get, but having it physically on me saves my sanity. And since so many times we bash our own work, it’s nice to remember that no matter how ugly and dirty it is, even the first drafts are loved enough to be saved. I’d cry if everything I’d ever written was destroyed, be it by flame or even the horrible hard drive fail.

So I ask you this: would you save your body of work from the threat of fiery destruction, or would you snatch up your Blu-ray collection? If you could only rescue one thing, what would it be?