Did you ever have one of those 'a-ha' moments when you sat back, took a good look at your surroundings, and asked yourself the question, "When did things get so out of control?"
I have no idea who said it originally - I'm sure it's been used in at least one movie I've seen at some point - but one of my favorite quotes is, "There's a fine line between genius and insanity."
I think I've crossed the line.
My study looks like a paper bomb blew up in it. And this is a tiny room, comparatively speaking - only about 10 by 12. I can see maybe, oh, 8 or 10 square feet of carpet. The rest is covered in piles of junk - books, file folders full of papers, loose papers, magazines I've hung onto because I just know one day I'll take the time to read them ... more books, boxes of books and papers. It's a genuine mess. Every day I look at this mess and think, "I've got to clean this up."
The WGH was watching a show on tru.tv (formerly CourtTV) the other night about the guys who clean up crime scenes. Fascinating, disturbing stuff. One segment showed a crew cleaning up the apartment of a guy who apparently had died of AIDS and by the end of his life he was no longer capable of taking care of himself or his place, and it was both sickening and heartbreaking - there was so much garbage in that apartment that it took them HOURS to clean it all out. Shards and scraps of this man's life, left behind for someone else to sift through.
I looked around my study and thought - and yes, this is morbid, but sometimes you have to be realistic - if something happened to me, my family would be left with cleaning up this mess, and they would have NO CLUE what to do with all this junk. The books would be easy - anything The Tall One didn't want could be donated to the library. But the rest of it? All the research notes and printed pages with critique notes and my own revisions ... six manuscripts' worth now. Four years' worth of paraphernalia associated with my being President of Sisters in Crime - Middle Tennessee. That would, of course, need to go to my successor. Probably does, anyway.
My Wonder Twin did an excellent post over at Murderati this morning about the chaos theory. My life and all its detritus has nothing whatsoever to do with her post, but the title, at least, is apropos when thinking in terms of what I'm sitting in the middle of.
Today, I'm going to work on this mess.
Now, you're probably wondering by this point why I decided to start my first post after six weeks of silence talking about the mess in my office. The answer to that question is that most of this mess is the reason I've been gone for six weeks.
In this period of time I have been doing a little self-analysis. Getting a grip on what it is I'm supposed to be doing. I've been working, battling the crud (two rounds of it now), giving up my position as President for SinC-MidTN (and on a side note, check out the newly revamped SinC-MidTN website as the new Prez has done an outstanding job making it look like something), catching up on my book reviews (thanks to the infinite patience of my fabulous editor in allowing me the time to get my act back together), taking on a new project as an editor (a paying gig), and starting the long and grueling process of ...
Submission.
It's an ugly word, but a necessary evil in our world. Submission. Not as far as the definition that may have popped into your head first - unless you're a writer, in which case you knew immediately what I was talking about. 'Submission' is the process every writer must go through in order to get a book on the shelves. The synopsis, the query letters, and the waiting. All part of the process. And I'm smack in the middle of it.
Because of the 'day job' I don't have a good grip on my time any more. I used to time manage quite well, but since I started working full-time again I haven't recovered and gotten a handle on things like I should. And I get derailed so much more easily than I used to. This is not a good place to be.
But I'm working on it. Slowly but surely, I'm shifting my grip. Trying to balance my stance so I can get a better hold. A stronger hold. On my sanity - or my genius, depending on how you want to look at it.
So, for those of you who have missed me, this is what I've been up to. As soon as I have news about the book, I'll share it. In the meantime, I'm still writing, still reading, and still trying to figure out what I'm going to do with all this stuff.
Later!
=) JB
"Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as Idleness."
-- Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) English author
Read a book. It's good for you. -- J.B. Thompson
No comments:
Post a Comment