NaNotWriMo 2014, Day 18: Organized Chaos

   by  katerha 

A little past the halfway point of the month, I’m pleased with my progress. An embarrassing amount of stuff has been removed from the room. Some of it books that went into another room. Some of it trash that is still being dealt with. A lot of it needs shredding. And I do mean a lot; there’s no way I could do it with my small shredder at home, so I’m taking it with me to work in small batches and dropping it into the shredder bins at work.

What remains in the room has been put into strategically placed themed piles.

For instance, the computers, the printer, all the cables, keyboards, mice, and other assorted computer-related equipment are all in one corner. The read books are all stacked together. All the souvenirs from cons are together. The bags are all together. The notebooks are all together. The desk toys are all in the same box.

And the Pisa-esque, somewhere-between-two-and-three-foot tower of past critiques perches precariously at the precipice of the portal.

Mocking me.

Perusing that will be the most time-consuming part, considering some of it is a novella I wrote, had critiqued, and then promptly lost off my hard drives. But once I transcribe whatever commentary I choose to keep from critiquers long past, the gods of recycling will receive them as my tribute.

I still gotta find places for all this stuff, mind you. But the paper is a huge part of it. And I’m making major inroads on it.

There are also an awful lot (most of a seven-foot shelf) of computer books that are now obsolete. Those probably need to either go away entirely or be donated or rehomed to someone who will use them. Anyone want a Visual Basic 5 book? SQL 6.5?

It’s actually getting harder and harder to FIND things to disposition because at this point “disposition” means “find a permanent storage solution,” and I’m not quite to that point, yet.

As for the other goal . . .

It’s getting there, I think. Every time I run across a scribbled note for the novel (series), I transcribe it in one place and toss the original. I have quite a file of ideas I forgot, a good number of which are really great ideas that I’m going to work in as I write my outline and refine it.

I know the endings of all three books. And the beginnings of two of them. I know a good deal of what’s going on in the world of my story, and realized that I’ve been ignoring a whole category of conflict that, in retrospect, I’ve been just stupid to ignore. I know the motivations of two of my bad guys.

Now I just need to come up with some more case characters and secondary characters to play in my world. The Magical Crimes Unit is a new division, after all, and has to share space with the other FBI agents, some of whom aren’t as friendly as others.

Internal strife. Why didn’t I think of that earlier?

And lastly, I’ve cut severely back on my YouTube viewing. I don’t think I’ve watched a single video in about a week. I’ve read, I’ve listened to podcasts, and I’ve wasted time on the Internet in other ways, but I’m definitely scaling back on YouTube.

Onward and upward!