Here I am again, minimally writing and editing because I am majorly cleaning and decluttering. It’s still winter in the tundra (as far as I can tell, BRR…) but as soon as the temps warm up enough, the plants are going outside and we are once again listing this house. Hopefully it will sell this spring, because as of late summer, I’m on my way to my retirement home in Colorado.
The longer I live, the more I realize I don’t need half the stuff I have. That also pertains to my accumulation of books. There are some books that are near and dear to my heart: ALL the Khalil Gibran, my T. Greenwood, Michelle Richmond, and Laura Kasischke collections, my art books, the Bible, and of course, the writing books. I’ve so far lugged six boxes of books to the Goodwill. Some are books from my To-Read mountain (I’ve got one of those on Kindle too). If I haven’t read it in two or three years, I’ll probably never read it. Others I’ve read but will probably never read again. Someone else should enjoy beachy romances, political discourse, and textbooks. I even gave away my entire collection of cookbooks, which was a massive one for sure. Now with the Internet, people pull up recipes online. You don’t need pretty books to take up space, and perhaps become covered in oil and flour dusting as you make something crazy like a duck in cherry sauce. Besides, I’m a competent cook these days and can’t remember the last time I cracked open a cookbook.
My latest modus operandi is to leave books in my wake after I’ve read them, especially when traveling. I leave them in motel rooms, airplanes, restaurants, and in my father’s house. One: books are heavy and I’m old. My suitcases start out heavy and end up infinitely lighter. (Except after the San Francisco Writers Conference, where I usually bulk up.) Two: read it, don’t need to read it again (unless you are one of my favs listed above). Let someone else enjoy the power and entertainment of words.
Decluttering a house means you’ll always find something you thought didn’t exist anymore, like the handmade cards my kids gave me for my birthday or the letter my grandma Della wrote to me in 1975. (Amazing. Her handwriting and my dad’s are almost identical.) I’ve also found many printed edits from my own work. Interesting to read what the editor(s) had to say, what words of encouragement they offered, or the oft wielded cattle prod to poke me out of my mistakes. I wrote so badly back then, it’s embarrassing! (I’m keeping Grandma’s letter, but the edits have been shredded and recycled.)
I opened a Donald Maass workbook and was immediately taken back to the first self-edit of my first book. I was sitting in his workshop at the San Francisco Writers Conference, where we did an exercise making our main character suffer, and suffer some more. And more. I was so enraptured with the process that I made her suffer to the point of intolerability. (Is that a word? Spell check says no.) The second draft was so painful to read my editors hated it, even my beta readers couldn’t stomach it. Even now as a finished product with many of the hardships removed, some people find the first part of the book trying, depending on what the reader’s own psyche can handle.
These days I understand what the intent of this exercise was. I’m still keeping the book. 🙂
When we moved into this house fourteen years ago, I probably had twelve boxes of books. Each of my kids probably had a half dozen boxes of their own. (We also had massive bookshelves, long since garage saled-away.) When I leave here, I’ll probably have four or five boxes of books, just enough to fit into to built-ins in my new house.
I love books, I really do, but what you’ll find in my library after the purge will be the true gems, the jewels I will never give away.
