Declutter and Regroup by Wendy H. Jones

My desk post declutter
I appreciate this blog should have been out about 12 hours ago, but I hope you will understand. My post is now the tale of why it is late.

It's been a busy time in the Jones household lately and writing has been interrupted. The circumstances around this were unfortunate and unavoidable. However, I am now, this week, back in fine fettle.

Add to this the fact my office used to be the garage in my house. It looks nothing like a garage and completely like an office. It has bookshelves galore, desk, computer and filing cabinet.  However, when it comes to weather it resorts to full blown garage mode at the sign of a temperature drop. Despite having a lovely big radiator, which I sit next to, it is freezing. If I add an extra electric heater into the mix, I am lovely and toastie but my daily energy costs are higher than the GDP of Australia.

Therefore, I did what any sensible writer would do and decanted to the living room. So what has that got to do with your blog being late I hear you ask. During the heating hiatus my office got used as a general dumping ground. It looked like armageddon had taken place in there and I couldn't dig my way to the computer. I was thinking of hiring an excavator but decided to do it using my own fair hands. So for the last 5 hours I have been decluttering my office and my desk. The computer is free of all shackles, my pens are lined up in a nice soldierly manner, notebooks are stacked ready to be cracked open and used and I've even put a nice new pinboard up.
All set and ready to hand


You'll probably notice that what I haven't done is  any writing. Well, never fear. All this decluttering has got me energised and ready to bash out my next opus. I'm one of those people who can't work in clutter. I need order around me to be able to make sense of what I am doing. Maybe it's my military background. Physical clutter just clutters my mind. It depresses me and makes me feel like I can't do anything. Restoring order to my office has made me feel much more positive and much more ready to take on the world. Or at least a couple of chapters of my WIP.

I'm wondering if others feel the same way. It would be interesting to see in the comments how people write and what stimulates them or blocks them. I'm going to leave you with a little bit of advice. If you're feeling stuck, try a bit of tidying up and see where it takes you.

By the way I'm off to tidy up the rest of the house which now looks like bombs exploded. I can see a visit to the dump in my future. Yes I really was tidying up.

About the Author 


Website


Wendy H. Jones is the author of the best selling DI Shona McKenzie Mystery series of crime novels set in Dundee. Killer's Crew, the fifth booking the series was released in November, 2016. Dagger's Curse, the first book in her Fergus and Flora, Young Adult Mystery series was released on 10th September, 2016.  She also has one non fiction book, Power Packed Book Marketing: Sell More Books.



Comments

Bill Kirton said…
Sorry, Wendy, I won't be a convert. On my scale of priorities, activities such as dusting, hoovering and tidying come just above cleaning my eyes with a brillo pad. Admittedly, I'm lucky in that I have a dedicated (warm) room to myself which never gets used for anything else. The rest of the house, I should add, is spotless.
Elizabeth Kay said…
It's the time of year. I spent yesterday doing exactly the same thing. Hubby bought me a hub (appropriate!) so that I can plug in all my different USBs. (Printer, Wi-fi booster as I'm at the opposite end of the house from the router, keyboard, camera lead, nestbox camera...) The trouble was that the Wi-fi booster has a short lead and can't extend any further as it doesn't like extensions. The printer has a short lead too, so I had to move everything around so that they'd all connect. In the process, of course, I evicted many spiders and found a number of things I thought I'd lost forever. And funnily enough, I didn't get any writing done either...

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