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Have you made your New Year’s resolutions yet? I guess I have, though they aren’t technically New Year’s resolutions. They are just things I wanted to get done and found that the year ended before I got to them.
In between working on Merry #7, as first draft, and the edits for BLOOD NOIR, I’ve been cleaning my office. Sorting that stack of papers that has been sitting for months. I have a tendency to keep hard copy of books. It goes back to the old days when paper was the only way to keep a copy of anything. Do any of you remember when a computer was not an option to save to? I may have written my first book on a computer, but my first stories were written on a typewriter. So, keeping paper copies was very important. I also had moments when the computer ate my files. Even my first husband, who was a computer engineer, could not save some of the files early on. They had become corrupted. Corrupted. It sounds so much more fun than the truth. All my hard work had become gibberish, or vanished into the ether. Those early computer mishaps scarred me for years. I was paranoid about back-ups. Then, just in the last two years we had the great computer crash. Do you guys remember that? Disksavers saved my ass.
That mystery computer moment, was actually a physical problem with the hardisk itself. For some reason it had scarred itself, the disk I mean. Jon, also a computer wizard, doesn’t know why it happened. Disksavers couldn’t tell us why it happened, only what, and save our data. So, paper.
But, I found a copy of A STROKE OF MIDNIGHT, and a partial copy of A KISS OF SHADOWS with notes and everything. Entire scenes that never got used, and characters written out. I had no idea I still had these pages. I’d saved them with the idea that the characters and scenes would get used later, but at this point in book seven, I know they are not going to be useful. So, they went in the shred box.
The corner of my big desk is clean for the first time in months.
Jon’s office is finally organized, a little.
I cleaned off my altar, and redid it. Much leaner, simpler. I’d gotten so many nifty things on my altar that it was confusing to the eye and getting hard to work with. I’ve got it boiled down to the minimum, and it just feels better.
We cleaned off the coffee table in the family room, and have kept it clean for about a week. A record for that table. My goal is to clean it off every night before bed. Completely clean every night.
We cleaned off the island in the kitchen about the same time, and have kept it clean, though it’s the hardest to stay ahead of clutter-wise. But a girl’s gotta have a goal. Clean off the island in the kitchen every night before bed, so at least you don’t loose ground.
I was able to eat breakfast in the breakfast nook with it’s bay window for the first time in years this week. We’d had so much trouble with clutter on the small table there, that I’d stated, we either clean it off and use it, or git rid of the table. Well, we cleaned it off. Frankly, I’d given up on the breakfast nook. It’s been so cool watching the birds at the bird feeders, and the heated bird bath while I have breakfast.
You know, I was feeling a little stressed about how few pages I’d accomplished today, but just listing all the above has made me more cheerful. Cool.
I tend to do the big things in my life. It’s the small things that tend to pile up for me. But there is a lot of satisfaction in getting the small things taken care of. Now that we’re getting the clutter under control, the only other thing that didn’t get done last year is an exercise program that we can actually stick to. We’ve fallen off the exercise bandwagon in the last few months, and have to get back on the it. Find a way to fit that in the schedule and I’m pretty much finished with my list of goals from last year. Nifty.