Creativity Takes Courage…

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…and a professional cleaner and organizer, I think. This is a picture of my craft room last January. It doesn’t look much different right now, with the exception that it appears the cats have been using it to deposit their fresh kill. Yay.

Honestly, I haven’t worked in there for two years. At least. Somewhat coincidentally, I haven’t blogged in two years. At least. Why? There’s so much to do. Homeschool. Write. Cook. Drive. Read. Learn Mandarin. Fling dead mice outside. It never stops.

Virginia Woolf needed a room of her own. Who knows how she kept it clean. I guess if you’re writing, you don’t make much of a mess, except for the coffee and blood stains. That’s just not my style, though, much to my dismay. I collect…stuff. Old dolls without heads, miscellaneous instrument parts, papers, colored pencils, yarn, you name it. And I’m organized, really: I’ve even got a bin labeled “rusty nails.” But there just isn’t enough room, and not enough time to declutter.

But that gets depressing, real fast (I admit, I’ve even thought “maybe I’ll just leave this for my kids to clean up after I die.”) That might work, unless I die in there, which is a strong possibility since I’m likely to trip and no one will come look for me because they’ll all be using the playstation and eating candy and not pondering their wonderful luck until it’s perhaps too late.

So now, 2012, and I’m starting anew. I will clean that room, I’ve made a new blog, and I’ve even written something (which ended up being about cannibalism, so it won’t be one of the first posts, just ’cause that seems wrong). Last year I goaded myself on with a “Shit That’s On My Floor” challenge: to help make the cleaning less horribly awful, I challenged myself to make a piece of art out of, well, shit that was on my floor each day. Not just the craft room floor, but the whole house. The dog helped greatly with this. You can see the results of that here.

I haven’t quite figured out my creative goals for this year yet (other than finishing “The Book of Dirt” in time to get my free CreateSpace copies), but I will clean out that room. And if you don’t see me for a few days…maybe come looking?