Not to mention wooden spoons to stir the soup, a few mementos of the kids' childhoods, and an antique or two.
Twenty-eight days to go, dead in the middle of one of the coldest snaps in recorded history, and isn't it ironic that the stuff project will end on the last day of winter? Between my two jobs and the $2.5M I'm trying to raise for a bicycle trail and strategic planning and a volunteer gig or two, I'm dreaming of the day when I don't have to come home from work, find something I don't need or want, and write about it.
I'm thinking, too, about how, if I'd spent a similar amount of time each day writing a novel, I'd probably have finished one by now. Of course, finishing a novel is no big accomplishment. I've already written two plus a children's book, and all three are stuffed in a RubberMaid bin in the basement, dusty, another few things I can't bring myself to get rid of.
My mystery novel was actually a damned good idea: Downsized to Death, about a young management consultant on a project (sound familiar?) and all the whacky characters she meets there. What could be a better idea for a series? Every four months, a new location, a new agency, a new murder. I've got a whole store of whacky characters and crazy stories from my consulting years.
Just last week, I was talking about a project at a county coroner's office where a corpse fell out the back of the coroner's van on the freeway during the project. Once, I got to see an animal control office stick a broom up a pit bull's butt. Another time, the undersheriff of one of the largest sheriff's departments in the country told me that the undersheriff is like the sheriff's underwear: he gets covered in shit while covering the sheriff's butt. I remember an elected official in a major county office excusing himself to go to the bathroom adjacent to his office during an audit interview; somehow he lit the bathroom garbage on fire so that after he came back, the room started to fill with smoke and the smoke alarm went off.
You can't make this stuff up. I even had a book agent who agreed to try to sell the book. Unfortunately, she thought the mystery I'd written came across more like the second book in the series, and wanted me to write the first book before she'd really begin shopping it around. I ran out of steam before the prequel was complete.
Well, if I'd spent time this year trying to sell my books rather than getting rid of stuff and writing about it, maybe I'd be published by now.
The trick is, though, that I wouldn't have. I might have made a resolution to do it, but in fact, I would have come home tired, or late, or preoccupied early on, and given myself permission to skip it. Then I would have skipped it again, and again, and within a month or two, I would've forgotten all about it.
Whether you have readers or not, if you make a resolution to publish a blog post every single day, and you don't, it's embarrassing. So I haven't published good stuff every day, but I've published. And I've gotten rid of something too.
Even if it was only Pollyanna.
I have appreciated your daily posts regardless of content or brevity. Many have set out to blog everyday and few have done it and even few have done it in a way that has caused me to read it
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