Well, I am vexed.
This is so annoying. I've got a laundry hamper full of old notebooks which I've been promising myself I'd sort out on my next free day. Well, here it is a free day for me, with nothing I have to urgently accomplish except a trip to the movies this evening, and I'm trying to clean my room. Books: sorted. Clothes: hung up. Scrap paper: thrown in the recycling. Good. Now for the hamper of notebooks. I'll put the old school notebooks that I know I'll never refer to again into the recycling (minus plastic covers and wire bindings), and save the writing notebooks which must be in there somewhere.
Discovery the First: every single one of those textbooks is a writing notebook. Because I am in the habit of jotting down notes for stories, poems, LJ posts, books, etc., on pages in my chemistry or French or History 101 textbooks, and I've been doing that forever. Writerly notes are interspersed with school notes throughout every single book in a manner that will make for a long and tedious sorting session, and makes it easier to save the whole book. Which doesn't get us any forwarder, because I need to get rid of notebooks. Darn it.
Discovery the Second: the more recent notebooks contain swaths of a story called "Diana's Minions", which I still want to write, but which seems to go on for hundreds of handwritten pages and doesn't get anywhere. It disheartens me. I knew I liked to write at length, but this is just plain long-winded. No wonder I have a hard time finishing anything.
Discovery the Third: there are empty three-ring binders in there for scrapbooks that I wanted to make and never did. I guess I am not the scrapbooking type. Still, it'll neaten everything up if I just three-hole-punch all my random sheets of paper with school assignments and shove them in a binder. There, something good has come of all this.
Discovery the Fourth: I have a filing cabinet which is full of old manuscripts for books which I wrote and which I have since revised and saved on multiple hard drives, plus seven or eight different drafts of various books and stories with handwritten edits I don't need anymore. The next task should be to clean out the filing cabinet's contents. Then the notebooks I can't get rid of can have a home, and after that I can type up all their useful contents and throw the hard copies out. There we go.
Edited to add: I got to the bottom of my hamper, and threw out about ten pounds of old school papers I don't need anymore. WOOT! I think sometimes that I hang onto everything on paper, compulsively, as a security blanket. I might need it again, and if I threw it out, where would I be? Then it's five years later and I'm digging out old scraps of paper from a bygone phase of my life, and I wonder why I ever wanted that sheet of paper in the first place. This must be the kind of assumption that leads to hoarding behavior. Enough of that. Now for a walk to the coffee shop to celebrate.
Discovery the First: every single one of those textbooks is a writing notebook. Because I am in the habit of jotting down notes for stories, poems, LJ posts, books, etc., on pages in my chemistry or French or History 101 textbooks, and I've been doing that forever. Writerly notes are interspersed with school notes throughout every single book in a manner that will make for a long and tedious sorting session, and makes it easier to save the whole book. Which doesn't get us any forwarder, because I need to get rid of notebooks. Darn it.
Discovery the Second: the more recent notebooks contain swaths of a story called "Diana's Minions", which I still want to write, but which seems to go on for hundreds of handwritten pages and doesn't get anywhere. It disheartens me. I knew I liked to write at length, but this is just plain long-winded. No wonder I have a hard time finishing anything.
Discovery the Third: there are empty three-ring binders in there for scrapbooks that I wanted to make and never did. I guess I am not the scrapbooking type. Still, it'll neaten everything up if I just three-hole-punch all my random sheets of paper with school assignments and shove them in a binder. There, something good has come of all this.
Discovery the Fourth: I have a filing cabinet which is full of old manuscripts for books which I wrote and which I have since revised and saved on multiple hard drives, plus seven or eight different drafts of various books and stories with handwritten edits I don't need anymore. The next task should be to clean out the filing cabinet's contents. Then the notebooks I can't get rid of can have a home, and after that I can type up all their useful contents and throw the hard copies out. There we go.
Edited to add: I got to the bottom of my hamper, and threw out about ten pounds of old school papers I don't need anymore. WOOT! I think sometimes that I hang onto everything on paper, compulsively, as a security blanket. I might need it again, and if I threw it out, where would I be? Then it's five years later and I'm digging out old scraps of paper from a bygone phase of my life, and I wonder why I ever wanted that sheet of paper in the first place. This must be the kind of assumption that leads to hoarding behavior. Enough of that. Now for a walk to the coffee shop to celebrate.