Lately I’ve been trying to clean house. Not the physical house where I live, but the metaphorical house of my writing. It’s easy to write a bunch of poems and not do anything with them or send them out and not keep track of where they’ve gone and so they never get submitted or posted here.
It’s harder to forget a novel I’ve written, but easy to forget where and to whom I’ve submitted queries and pages. So I’m getting organized and in the process I’m realizing I have a lot of projects hanging: three chapbook manuscripts, two novels and one short story collection finished. Various poems in need of polish, submission, posting or all of the above. One novel halfway finished. A Place Without a Postcard in need of digitizing for ebook readers. A couple of videos to make.
That’s a lot to square away and finish (starting is so much more fun than finishing) and I’m also considering doing NaNoWriMo again. The question on that one, then, is what to write next month. I’m vacillating between finishing the unfinished novel I started last November and have hardly worked on since, or starting something altogether new that I’ve been thinking about for a long time.
In the meantime, while weighing this decision, I’m trying to get the non-writing portion of my writing house in order. Trying to figure out where to begin. I suddenly realize I’ve opened all these doors (or perhaps cans of worms) and now have so many open, I hardly know where to begin. This is why companies hire project managers. Or maybe why they invented Ritalin—wait, gotta go, there’s something bright and shiny outside my window.
James Brush is a teacher and writer who lives in Austin, TX. He tries to get outside as much as possible.
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