Packing is a Good Thing

With a move back to Iowa on the Horizon, I've been doing a LOT of packing recently. And organizing. It's been quite a job for a person with pack-ratty tendencies, and if there's anything I've learned from watching 'Hoarders', other than I want to clean the whole house every time I watch it, is that you can't get rid of a bunch of junk that took you a long time to accumulate over a period of time. Once you get overwhelmed, you have to stop.

It's a lot like rewriting in a lot of ways. Your work accumulates all this excess junk and you have to dejunk it. Sometimes it's hard because you come across stuff from college and birthday cards and a great monologue that just don't really belong anymore. And you have to pick and choose what stays and what goes. Sometimes all the cards will go in the recycling bin (literally) and the monologue will too (figuratively). But the stuff from college begins to get collected into a box to keep--sometimes you have to keep it to weed it out later. And you have to know when to stop and when to go again.

Aside from that, it made me update and prune my submissions book. I have elaborate ways of doing everything--making a submissions book is not exempt. I keep all the submissions I am going to make or have made, in a program called Debrief, and then I keep a running list in Excel of what I have already in my physical notebook and Debrief, and then there's the physical notebook of loose leaf pages with check lists for each theatre. It has taken a LONG time to get it together, and I went through all the months so far but stopped at November--there were a lot of theatres that still had their information up from last year, with a promise of new information in coming months. My primary concern is that I get everything from now until the end of August done as much as I can before June.

Yep, I'm a bit crazy, but that's me.

Writing is coming along...strangely. I have officially recycled (literally) the second draft of 'Mine' and printed out the 3rd draft, which is residing in my writing bag, still in backwards order, with all my notes from the second draft. There's still a lot to do, and I frequently think I want to work on it (and I do think about it frequently) but I don't work on it. No reason--just not ready I think.

On the upcoming workshops front--all my stuff is in for Valdez except my final edits. I just need to take a day, get my computer, go to Panera, and work until I'm done. Then email it back to Dawson. I got the contract for Reston and need to mail that back by the end of the week.

So things are coming along...part of me is sad to leave Arkansas. I love the weather here, and I know that I am going to be cursing everything and anything starting about November, but I am going to be so happy to be back to my family and the land of my heart--and to be married!

Enough personal stuff--time to write, or at least think about 'Mine'.