Continuing the mental Cntr-Alt-Del

It’s day two of the great purge-and-reset, and I’m yet to get out of the office. Twelve straight hours of sorting files and making mental notes on projects yesterday (which proved surprisingly exhausting) and I’m finally down to the last box of lost papers/books and a two-drawer desk-caddy that’s got loose papers in it. I figure I’ll have the study finished tonight, then it’s on to the bedroom.

Oh, the things that have been tossed out over the last twenty-four hours. I’ve made seven trips to the bin thus far, each time loaded up with an arm-full of paperwork I no longer need, and what remains is still a pile large enough to animate and give sage advice to fraggles should it so desire. Among the many things tossed out: tax records from 1995; hard-copy of seven chapters from a fantasy novel draft I’m pretty sure I didn’t write – I think it’s Sean’s, from back before I spooked him out of asking about things like that and WoW devoured his life; stacks of notes from sixteen different RPG campaigns I barely remember running (three I remember with fondness were kept for archival purposes); seven different drafts of the Unicorn novella; a metric butt-load of e-book print-outs from my CGW days; 30 or so notebooks full of shorthand recording student presentations from the last seven years. None of these things should have been kept, not really, but I’m a stacker by nature – things get put in piles and shuffled around, without ever being dealt with, and thus the bottom of the piles tends to get a bit archaeological when they’re finally reached.

I do have three of the four primary e-mail address sorted now, though; if you’re expecting an e-mail from me about something and I haven’t gotten back to you, it might be a good time to drop me a line and remind me that I owe you an answer about stuff*.

I think I’ve also got a more-or-less accurate list of all the writing projects that are taking up mental real-estate lately, which I’ll be going through and sorting in current-near future-far future piles to make sure the focus goes where it needs to once the purge is done.

*Random note, since it appears some people don’t know and have been following the journal since the con: I no longer have access to the old gen con/eventions address. If you’ve been trying to get in contact with me that way and haven’t gotten a reply, leave a message here and I’ll send you an e-mail from a more reliable address.