Writing in Chaos

While I'm in the mood to "come out" I may as well admit that I am a "desk slob". You would think that writing would not necessarily be a messy hobby, but I beg to differ. Even my bosses at work are telling me to clean up my desk when I have down time - in one ear and out the other though as they say. I have a couple of in-trays that seem to catch the majority of my paperwork. Just the other day I went through them looking for something and I discovered paperwork in there from when I started my job. At the end of every day, however, I do stack all my paperwork and notebooks etc neatly in one pile - the cleaners like that apparently.
My desk at home is no different. While Wifey is allowed in to my study (we share a laptop) and is even allowed to do "some" cleaning every now and then, she is totally banned from cleaning my desk.
As you can see from the photo (which is my actual desk in my actual study) I work in organised chaos. I know that the pile of paperwork behind the laptop contains my 20th-something draft of The Guardians, along with my most recent editing notes. And that the paperwork on the right of the laptop contains a paid phone account (though Wifey may have been in there and filed that away by now). There is a box way in the back that contains all of our random hardware store receipts that I will "one day" get around to entering in to my you-beaut state-of-the-art renovation-cost-tracking spreadsheet. In all that chaos though, I do have some helpful items - my dictionaries and name book (I'm terrible with character naming), my eee pc which I write on when Wifey is hogging the laptop, as well as a roller derby flyer I am using as brain fodder for a Top Secret Project. And pens - lots of pens!
I really do try to keep my desk clean - even to the point of organising my notes into "like" piles, and then transferring them to folders - which are hidden in my desk drawers. But what do you do when things fit in to more than one pile? I put them in 2 files - one called "Miscellaneous"  and the other called "Randoms" (which at this point in time holds the most paperwork in all of my other files combined!)
There is method in my madness though, and it is this - if my desk looks messy, it's because I am too busy to clean it up. And it means that if I LOOK busy, and I FEEL busy, I MUST be busy! :)
I do have a feeling, however, that since a 3-day weekend is imminent, I will have "Clean study AND desk" written on my To-Do list.
Happy Labour Day weekend everyone.

I'm Coming Out

My grandmother passed away a few weeks ago. She was my last surviving grandparent, which made her extremely important and special in my life. It also makes her passing extremely hard to come to grips with. Sometimes I feel an overwhelming sense of guilt at the things I didn't get to share with her, and the memories we will never get to make because I lived so far away from her. But when I think back over her life and the time I was lucky enough to have with her (35 years of memories), I realise if there's one thing she taught me, it's that life is far too short for regrets.
Instead of lamenting over what I could have done with my life to this point, I have resolved to do something about it. It is finally time for me to come out - as a writer. You see, I'm accountant by trade which in itself is a noble profession. However, accounting is what I do - writing is part of who I am. So today is the day I get serious about my writing. Today is the day I declare myself a "Writer" instead of an "accountant".
So to honour the passing of a woman who was loving, kind, generous, proud and genuine, I declare that today is the day I move my life in the direction it should be going.
I don't know where this blog will take me - whether it will be my musings on learning the craft I have been practicing in private for the last ten years, rants about how damned hard it is to put words on paper, or ravings about life in general. But I do know that today is the day that I take control and become the person my grandmother always knew I could be.