Posted by: C.D. Reimer in 2008 on 29 Jan 2008
When I took the week off between Christmas and New Year's, I expected to use the free time to go on a creative binge of writing, painting, drawing, and perhaps some programming. Didn't happen. Christmas shopping—better late than never—took up a whole day. My Dad spent three days snoring away in my green chair when we weren't visiting family in Gilroy for Christmas Eve and Morgan Hill for Christmas Day. My six-month-old great-nephew made off like a bandit when he got 40 Christmas presents that took three hours to unwrap, overwhelming his parents by the generosity of family and friends. A somewhat gloomy Christmas as most of my family are unemployed and/or concern about losing their homes because of the subprime mess. A friend and I saw a couple of movies (Sweeney Todd and Alien Vs. Predator Requiem), went shopping for a new hard drive for his system and installed Windows XP (which isn't on my top ten list of fun things to do during the holidays). I went to the DMV to take my driving test to get my driver's license for the first time. (No, I didn't grow up on the East Coast.) When most of the week came and went, I had to face the consequences of being a very creative person this past year.
Clutter. Lots and lots of clutter. Not just ordinary clutter—artistic clutter.
When you're a writer, you need a place for your manual typewriter (yes, I'm ancient), laptop, laser printer, and the creative output of drafts, revisions and letters. When you paint or draw, you need a place for your brushes, paints, pens, and the creative output of canvases, panels, tablets and sheets. When you're a programmer, you need a place to stack all those doorstoppers—programming books—that you keep promising not to buy another one until you read the last dozen or so. (This also applies to a backlog of fiction and non-fiction books that I haven't read yet.) When you take several semesters of an all day Saturday class in ceramics, you bring home lots of small pieces and several big pieces weighing 25 pounds each, left over clay, and a clay-crusted toolbox.
I spent New Year's Day going through the clutter scattered in my apartment. I got a four-drawer commercial filing cabinet to toss paperwork into. Re-arranged my desk, table and computers with all that cabling into a more functional layout. Cleared out space in my closet to store blank paper and canvases. Straighten out my shelves so I can store the small ceramics with the books, and cleared some floor space for the larger ceramic pieces. Put all my painting supplies on the top of the book shelves. Everything else I didn't need got tossed out into the recycling dumpster. I went from clutter to organized clutter. It'll probably take me the rest of the year to re-organize the organized clutter into something less than clutter. Since then I been pretty good about keeping the clutter organized and my living space tidy.
The most important area today is my writing table. I replaced the manual typewriter (piece of junk) with an electronic typewriter (very nice). Organized my working folders to be underneath the table, and everything else went into the filing cabinet. The clutter that normally drifts over from the kitchen table either stays there or goes into the recycling bin. Writing is becoming a second full time job when I'm not working at a help desk to fix broken users and consoling hurt computers. I got 16 short stories circulating for publication, editing a short story and a novella, more ideas in the pipeline, and my first novel that I'm planning to write from April's Fools Day to New Year's Eve. This year should be the year that I get published and start my five year journey into becoming a full time writer.
Website Updates: When I get the clutter on my hard drive organized, I'll start updating the website. Since this is the tenth year of my website, I should probably get that straighten out soon so I can have a tenth anniversary redesign. I'll probably be blogging a bit more since this is a platform to show off my amazing writing talents.