End of Year Wrapup

I've been purging closets and drawers lately, wanting to start the new year with an uncluttered and streamlined house. Much like when I'm rewriting, I find there are some "darlings" I'm holding onto  for inexplicable reasons. Maybe because so much time and effort went into their creation, or because I think I'll use it somewhere or somehow else, or I acquired it for some self that I wanted to be at the time.

So I'm going to create a "dump box," the equivalent of a "dump file." A dump file is where I put large sections of text that I think I might use elsewhere, but they certainly don't belong in this scene or chapter. Honestly, most of the time they quietly languish there, but every once in awhile I realize it was just in the wrong spot. Then I can recover it and put it in the right spot, without having to struggle to remember what I'd written.

The dump box will have items that I'm not quite ready to let go of, but putting them in the box will hopefully bring me some distance to decide if I really need it. After all, we have a fairly small house, and every item in it really has to earn its keep.

Hey--that's like writing too! Every word in a sentence has to contribute to the whole, as well as having its own weight. And here I was worried I wouldn't be able to tie housecleaning into writing for this post. ;)

Anyway, all the best wishes for you and yours and your writing from Operation Awesome! I'll leave you with a lovely winter scene from our snowfall a few weeks ago.