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Spring cleaning and the fine art of procrastination It's windy as anything today - sky is gray with grit being blown and we woke around noon (got to sleep at 6:30 a.m. with birds starting to chirp) to the sound of the house being battered with grit and just hard slamming winds. The cats are all electric furred and delighted, rampaging through the house.

In the spirit of novels and actually Getting Something Done, which has been on hold while I keep writing and writing and writing which is wonderful but doesn't result in stories ever getting into the hands of readers because I'm working on the next and the next and the next, I took four hours last night and finally organized everything I have for each novel I should be marketing or doing something with.

This is something I've been wanting to do at the same time I have not been finding time for it primarily because the next story has come along. But last night I wrote 8 pages (and it was an all fiction day, so that was irritating) and then flatly didn't want to write anymore. That's unusual enough to not worry about so I went and did the notebook.

The project was sneered at by a writer friend and to some extent by my husband, as being the sort of thing one does to distract oneself from actually sending something to an editor. These two are often right and call me on my avoidance techniques. This time, though, it was the back of brain message: You have got to get things organized before you try to move forward. Which I kept translating as Clean your office before you start, which granted is always a possibility as it is always covered in paper, pens, books, printed out paper, more books, cat fur and cats.

Only this time the voice saying Get organized was right. Because now I have all my proposals, back cover copy, blurbs, final copies, etc. in one place with all the file names recorded so I can go right to them in the computer. I know which books have complete packages for either submitting or posting. I know which books are missing part of the package. I know where I have books with no packages and packages with no books (because I want to write them, soon).

Spring cleaning, a la writer. And to celebrate, I suppose, this morning Rick and I opened up two computers and extracted their hard drives as from what I can tell, if your computer dies and will not under any circumstances work and give you your stories and pictures and so on, you should take it to A Foreign Country Computer People Suspect of Bad Computer Karma and tell them it's all your financial info and apparently they can make it work again. There are all these arcane solutions for destroying the things – hit them with a rock, anger Zeus and duck the thunderbolt so it hits the hard drive, soak it in soda so that all the dangerous chemicals are floating around in a bucket in your house (love that one). After reading these endless argumentative geeky solutions, thunderstruck that a computer that won't work for me at all is apparently bound and determined to go spill my presumably very valuable personal data to the evil hoards of That Foregin Country's hackers (or something), I decided to hit them with a hammer (the hard drives, not the hackers, I can't afford to go to That Foregin Country and probably you can't take a hammer as carryon), wrap them in plastic and duct tape and when it's nice out, ask Rick to create some cement stepping stones, and bury these things like bodies.

And of course the really cool thing is that I replaced those two desk top computers in 2009. The project has only taken three years so far....

Posted by Jennifer Rachel Baumer at 3:41 PM Labels: getting organized, sending writing out, writing work


