Incubating WIP

How else will all my WIP get hatched?

I spent hours today--and I mean hours and hours and... well, from 7am ish to 7pm ish with a few brief breaks--sorting and organizing boxes, books, papers, notebooks, drawers, shelves, pencils, pens, highlighters, paperclips, glue, tape, and other misc office type paraphernalia.  And in spite of Merlin's help, I feel I have a pretty good setup tho I'm sure there will be a few kinks to work out.

What got into me?

Well, in the last few weeks as my focus shifted from 8-12 hours of crochet and video per day back towards reading, writing, research and blogging I found myself constantly having to get up to rummage around in drawers and boxes and folders and notebooks and shelves that I could not reach from my workstation on the bed.  Or, if Ed was sleeping as he is for the bulk of my working hours, waiting for the chance to do so.  

This was frustrating.  Beyond frustrating to the point of 'why bother?'

Also it was startling as not so long ago--2 years?  really?--all that reading-writing-research-blogging stuff was within fairly easy reach of where I sit on the bed to work.  Over the last two years--especially this last one--as crochet took over the materials for crochet projects encroached on the territory of the reading-writing-research-blogging materials and slowly pushed them out.

So in the last weeks I've been trying to do reading-writing-research-blogging tasks with dozens of balls of thread and over a dozen bags and pouches containing projects and/or their tools and supplies filling up every nook and cranny of the space within arms reach of where I'm sitting and almost none of the notebooks, pencils, post-its, paper-clips in sight.  And few of the books. 

I was determined not to let the new ambition and inspiration dissipate due to this

imbroglio so I'd slowly been gathering the items I needed and keeping them in shoebox sized boxes that I could pull off the shelf or the floor where I kept them when I slept.  At first there was one, then two and then last week I added two more.  These boxes held mostly the books related by project and did not yet hold much of the implements and supplies necessary for serious reading-writing-research.

So I set out today to prepare the note taking materials and set up project boxes for the most current and/or urgent projects.  I now have 5 shoebox sized boxes and 1 shelf that holds close to triple of one of them.  

The shelf holds all of the books awaiting reviews.  A few are my own, about half belong to my niece and a few are currently out of the library.

One box holds books I want to read in as close to daily as possible--the current novel, two myth/fable anthologies, a mythology essentials guide and a comparative study of the stories in the Old Testament with stories from around the world with similar elements, themes, events.  There is also an audio book from the library but that is mostly to keep the board my netbook sits on level when I use this box for my desk.  But it also makes sense to keep it in close association with the netbook as that is most likely what I'll play it on.

Another box, slightly larger has more myth/fable related books.  A mix of owned and library.  About ten I think.  I can't see it right now as it is not in the tiny pool of light I must work with once Ed is asleep.

A third box holds all the NF library books and it isn't quite full but either tomorrow or Monday depending on whether Ed gets off work before the library closes tomorrow, I'll have more NF than that box will hold.  I've cleared the shelf above the one holding the review books for these and then that box will hold BBW materials for the duration of Banned Book Week.  And after that materials for my NaNoWriMo novel.

A forth box holds books related to reading and writing and right now even the writing books are about writing about books or reading as a writer.  There's a scholarly exegesis of the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale with a feminist slant and my Britannica Great Books copy of War and Peace which I started during the Read-Your-Own-Books Read-a-Thon last weekend.  Actually I restarted it for the upteenth time.  The first time, spring of my senior year in high school, was the first time and the time I got the farthest having passed page 300.  Which would be page 150 or so in this copy as it is printed in two columns per page and each column contains approximately the word count of a typical fat novel's page to the best of my ability to guestimate by counting words in lines and lines on page.

The fifth box holds note taking materials.  Designated notebooks, scratchpads, pencils, Post-its, sticky tabs and so forth.

So I'm all set.  And now, well, now I must sleep for to get this project done I had to take advantage of Ed being at work so I sacrificed my sleep which is ideally from pre-dawn to early afternoon.

NOTE: all of the shifting of things around today had me putting my hands and eyes on my crochet and other fiber arts stuffs and I found myself itching to get back to them too.  But I MUST keep a balance.  I don't want to give up reading and writing for crochet and needlework nor visa versa but in order to keep them all in my life I must fight my propensity to hyper-focus on one thing to the detriment of all else.  Like spending 12+ hours sorting, searching, organizing...