MAY DAY WITH TIDY NOTICEBOARDS AND WORDS WORKED

Happy May Day! 

Today I started tidying up my workroom very, very slowly. I took down two overloaded cork-boards, collect all the postcards, pictures and Thank You For Visiting Our School cards together and put them into a filing cabinet drawer which was quite a squeeze. The drawer is full enough to need tidying too, but that’s for another day.  (nb. The noticeboard shown is not mine but has the same spirit about it. One day I will know how to prep photographs for blogposts! )

Then I unpinned the name badges and neck tags, collected them all together and dropped them in a tin. Then I try to find a place to put the tin.  

Oh, here’s a handy overcrowded shelf!  

 I wedge the tin in there, which is, in tidying terms, hardly better than nothing and definitely not Mari-Kondo-esque.

My really favourite method for tidying rooms home here is to take everything off to another room, sort it out and then put the good stuff back again, in an orderly way. A bit like an extended IT Crowd suggestion. However, this feat is not what I haven’t time for right now, or for this month or possibly during this whole summer. But those two notice-boards are now temptingly empty spaces for more stuff . I'm sure I can find some . . .

I’m partly in this clearing mood because I’m also getting my current, big Work-In-Progress cleaned out and clarified. This WIP is a long thing with many characters and a complicated plotline and I really need to be in the zone when I’m working on the text. If not, things get forgotten even if I’ve noted them down on scraps of paper already and pinned them to the two other noticeboards. Cryptic Notes, yes. Unrecognisable Notes, yes. Possibly still Useful Notes? Ah. 

I must not, however, complain because suddenly the wretched thing – or that’s how the WIP has often felt – has got going again. This is a good positive feeling although there is still a very huge and scary Big Final Section to go.  

Right now, the WIP feels more than a bit like Frankenstein’s Monster lurching awkwardly onwards with all the joins showing and bits in danger of falling off as it proceeds. 

Stomp, stomp, stomp into the mist.

Yesterday, with the rain, hail and snow blasting outside, I opted for a bout of book dreaming and came up with a few early reader book ideas. This process is so very different to writing fiction, being much more like like a “poetry” state of mind where you need to use an intense focus and a limited number of words. Not sure any ideas will come to anything, although I am quite fond of one rather surreal forty-word text. Fingers crossed, as ever.

Then, however, all the hours of screen work suddenly reminded my poor eyes that it was time to focus on a different activity - which prompted the sudden longing for clean and empty spaces - or noticeboards, which is where I began this post.

Onwards, even if in a circular fashion.

Have a great May Day weekend!