Cleaning House, with Edits

Dude, she's smiling. Then again, if my kitchen was that organized...yeah, not likely. Ever.

I know there are some folks who are spring cleaners. I'm a fall cleaner. Okay, technically it's still summer, but when the temperature stays out of the 90's for more than a week and the sunflowers are blooming, summer's on its way out. Which means I start wondering if I can stand the thought of spending winter holed up in my house. By the end of August, the answer is usually no. So I start going through the piles of mail that "I might want to look at" and tossing shit - that grocery store coupon magazine that expired at the end of June, the alumni mag from my college, etc., etc. My husband's packrat nature and complete lack of interest in cleaning anything doesn't help much. So I'm tackling one thing at a time. Believe me, anything more would send me screaming through the streets.

So why the hell am I even talking about this? Probably because I need to edit the short story that I finished (still a "yay, me!") and I really need to wait at least another day. I'm still too damn in love with my fabulous prose to give it the heavy duty edit it needs to push it to the next level. And that's where all the cleaning crap comes in. I have some really good ideas when I'm doing something completely monotonous & potentially icky (I have a continuing phobia that I'll pick up a pile of papers & a giant spider will leap out and...I dunno, kick my ass and make me watch daytime television in Latvian...or something). So while it all percolates in my mush brain, I clean. Wow. The life of a writer is, like, so totally lame I can't even believe it. Still beats the hell out of a day job, though!