Seanan McGuire (seanan_mcguire) wrote,
Seanan McGuire
seanan_mcguire

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My mind, like my house, is a very messy place sometimes.

I am currently trying to transform my place of residence from a welter of stuff* into something halfway functional. I have a lot of motivation. I not only want to have a viable idea of what I have, thus telling me what I need to acquire if I want to finish various collections, I want to get rid of things that I don't really want. That way, I can pack with more assurance. Every move is focused on that sweet eventual goal: Seattle. I want to get out of the Bay Area, and after co-habitation with The Housemate for over a decade, my extraction has to be slow and careful, lest we wind up going to war over who owns that battered old paperback book.**

Some of the de-cluttering efforts are obvious. For example, I am putting books in boxes, indexing their contents, and putting the boxes in a big stack of boxes (also filled with books). I am putting things I have no emotional attachment to/desire to keep in other boxes, and sending them away on a regular basis. I am freely giving things to strangers. Other efforts are less obvious. I bought two new cat trees, because cats knock stuff over, thus creating more mess than they will when given places of their own. I've been saving boxes, which makes more mess, at least until the boxes are filled and put away. And so on.

My brain is no tidier. In trying to clean up my link list, I found things that have literally been waiting for their shining moment for up to two years. Will I ever really get around to some of these? No. No, I will not. That makes me sad, but I'd like to see the floor in my rotating "to do" file someday, just like I'd like to see it in my kitchen, and so away they go. Farewell, sweet links. I hardly knew ye.

Still. Once, Feed was a best-selling title in an Australian bookstore. I was nominated for a Romantic Times award. Apex put out an anthology with my wacky Fighting Pumpkins alien invasion story in it. And I needed to take a nap.

I will probably do some really random review posts in the next few days, just to clear out some links that have waited long past their best-by date. This has never been a judgment on those reviews in specific; it's just how out of control the file has gotten. I need a maid to go with that nap, I swear.

Anybody want to come over and help me index stuff?

(*Let's be clear here: most of it is good stuff. That's why it's there. But not all of it is good stuff. Some of it is bad stuff. Some of it is the kind of stuff that seemed like good stuff six years ago, when I was a different person, or when I really thought that someday I, too, would be a world-class guitarist. And some of it, sad to say, is crap.)

(**If you don't think this is something worth going to war over, you're either not a bibliophile or have never had someone try to take one of your best-beloved books away from you. Not being in the mood to start global thermonuclear destruction, I am doing my best to avoid this.)
Tags: being productive, cleaning my house, cranky blonde is cranky, geekiness, having a life, silliness, state of the blonde, utterly exhausted
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  • 88 comments
I am another who would love to come help you index stuff, except I live in Winnipeg, so not really practical. However, as a professional organizer by trade (well, former trade, just retiring) I applaud the effort to distinguish well in advance of the move what is important and what is not so important anymore to the person you are now. As a fanatical bibliophile I also applaud the effort to get the books very carefully sorted. My most beloved feature of my home and the reason I can never move is my main bookcase, built when we remodelled the roof a few years back. 22 feet long, 12 feet high, oak built in shelving with a rolling library ladder. I love the rest of my house (including the other 9 bookcases) but the built in is my best beloved. I would save my husband and the cats first, in case of fire, but I might just choose to go up in flames with the books!
You are at the in between stage which is so hard to live with - in order to de-clutter and organize you first have to increase the clutter by taking apart the stacks and saving boxes and all that - your brain will feel less cluttered once you start to get past the mid-point. Hang in there! And my mantra with clients was, when in doubt, to ask yourself "Under what circumstances would I use this again?" If there is not a really good answer, let it go make someone else happy!

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Oh well done you! It is NOT easy, but it does get easier with practice and it does feel good not to be surrounded by the excess stuff. Another good one I find useful is to not bring it home unless I know where I will keep it. I have found since clearing out my parents and my in laws houses that it is a lot easier to avoid bringing more stuff into my own!

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