Cleaning House

I had a relative move out this week after living here for six months. Another will be moving into the revolving door my house has become soon, so I have a lot of cleaning and laundry to get done in a short amount of time. In the past few days I've been doing mounds of laundry and bedding, and, since a lot of clothing got left behind, I had to decide what to take to Goodwill and what to take to the trash. Sorting through what's good enough to keep and what to toss.

And, after the laundry gets done, I can start getting down to details. Vacuuming, scrubbing, picking up empty peanut butter cups, etc. All those details that happened during his tenure here need to be assessed and a decision made as to whether it's worth hanging onto.

And, of course, this all reminded me of editing a manuscript once you type "The End." First, you clean up the glaring errors, or fill in the gaping holes in your story line. Then, you get down to the details. You can vacuum up a lot of them quickly, such as changing out straight quotes with curly ones. But then there are those details that have become so ingrained in the story that it's really hard to scrub the story clean. Lots of elbow grease is going to be needed to have the end product be clean as a whistle.

So, in between loads of laundry and vacuuming this weekend, I'll be cleaning off my laptop in preparation for getting serious writing time in next week on my new story. I've got the story line planned, just like I have a plan for cleaning the upstairs. But, as is always the case, the story has a tendency to go its own way, regardless of the amount of planning I have done. I only hope there are no surprises when it comes to cleaning the second floor.