Organizing no Jutsu...
Mar. 21st, 2005 12:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rushthatspeaks... don't I wish. I've started the terrifying, horrifying, This Could Just Get Ugly process of attempting to deal with my personal papers, and it would be so nice to just make some ninja hand signals in their general direction and not have to think about it.
Unfortunately, I am not just dealing with the fallout of the move into our current apartment here. I am dealing with the fallout of every single time I've moved since the beginning of high school, because my philosophy of papers and moving has always been 'throw unsorted into box to deal with when things have settled'. This breeds boxes like nobody's business but more than exponentially increases the peace of mind and ease of the move: fair trade.
Things have now settled, and it is the Day of Reckoning, and I have two overstuffed unsorted filing cabinets (with all my wife's stuff mixed into them at random) and something between nine and seventeen boxes filled entirely with paper under the bed. From these I must produce a Filing System, and possibly some explanation of whyinhell I kept all of my highschool biology homework. I only wish I could throw it all out, but things such as fifteen years of indiscriminate journaling are in there, as well as all my early writing (which in and of itself constitutes proof that everyone has to write a million words of utter dreck before they start producing reasonable work... and that the word count for prose and poetry doesn't overlap). I also have the writerly trait of scribbling on any surface that happens to be within range, and so find myself in the position of doing things like throwing out four years worth of accumulated French homework and carefully filing the folder it was all shoved into, wondering meanwhile whether the story on the folder continues/begins on a different folder, in a notebook, in a folder or notebook I threw out five years ago, or never. In addition, I am physically incapable of throwing away any notebook or pad with more than ten blank pages, even if the full pages are taken up with my previous next door neighbor's ten-year-old's terrible drawings of horsies.
Sometimes it feels like a cross between an explosion in a paper factory and a very, very bad dream.
On the other hand, today I found the first fiction I ever tried to write, when I was six years old, in the back of my first-grade science notebook. It is written entirely in capital letters (my handwriting was shaky)and retraced several times in soft pencil, and the pages are numbered in an esoteric and incomprehensible way that I cannot now understand. The first chapter is three sentences long, and I searched for two pages before finding a sentence which does not end with an exclamation point. It goes on for forty-five pages longhand before ending mid-word, and manages to rip off Heinlein, L'Engle, and E.E. Smith sequentially. The heroine spends forty pages of it tied up (to different things, by different baddies) and the other five Achieving Transcendence via a sequence involving a seraph who calls her 'oh exalted one' and tells her that she has 'a mind like that of the Creator'. I should note that said five pages are in the middle and she gets tied up again afterwards. I also appear to have subscribed to the school of fantasy naming in which you take a pile of letters and toss them up in the air and take the ones that land on your lap; I was excessively fond of double fs.
I feel all warm and fuzzy when I look at this, because I can remember writing it, and I was sure it was absolute genius. For six, it's damn good-- same set of characters throughout, episodic plot but one in which stuff does happen and is resolved, forty-five pages, and I knew the words 'exalted' and 'seraph' and how to spell them. And it has bad illustrations in crayon.
You can't buy childhood memories like that.
Unfortunately, I am not just dealing with the fallout of the move into our current apartment here. I am dealing with the fallout of every single time I've moved since the beginning of high school, because my philosophy of papers and moving has always been 'throw unsorted into box to deal with when things have settled'. This breeds boxes like nobody's business but more than exponentially increases the peace of mind and ease of the move: fair trade.
Things have now settled, and it is the Day of Reckoning, and I have two overstuffed unsorted filing cabinets (with all my wife's stuff mixed into them at random) and something between nine and seventeen boxes filled entirely with paper under the bed. From these I must produce a Filing System, and possibly some explanation of whyinhell I kept all of my highschool biology homework. I only wish I could throw it all out, but things such as fifteen years of indiscriminate journaling are in there, as well as all my early writing (which in and of itself constitutes proof that everyone has to write a million words of utter dreck before they start producing reasonable work... and that the word count for prose and poetry doesn't overlap). I also have the writerly trait of scribbling on any surface that happens to be within range, and so find myself in the position of doing things like throwing out four years worth of accumulated French homework and carefully filing the folder it was all shoved into, wondering meanwhile whether the story on the folder continues/begins on a different folder, in a notebook, in a folder or notebook I threw out five years ago, or never. In addition, I am physically incapable of throwing away any notebook or pad with more than ten blank pages, even if the full pages are taken up with my previous next door neighbor's ten-year-old's terrible drawings of horsies.
Sometimes it feels like a cross between an explosion in a paper factory and a very, very bad dream.
On the other hand, today I found the first fiction I ever tried to write, when I was six years old, in the back of my first-grade science notebook. It is written entirely in capital letters (my handwriting was shaky)and retraced several times in soft pencil, and the pages are numbered in an esoteric and incomprehensible way that I cannot now understand. The first chapter is three sentences long, and I searched for two pages before finding a sentence which does not end with an exclamation point. It goes on for forty-five pages longhand before ending mid-word, and manages to rip off Heinlein, L'Engle, and E.E. Smith sequentially. The heroine spends forty pages of it tied up (to different things, by different baddies) and the other five Achieving Transcendence via a sequence involving a seraph who calls her 'oh exalted one' and tells her that she has 'a mind like that of the Creator'. I should note that said five pages are in the middle and she gets tied up again afterwards. I also appear to have subscribed to the school of fantasy naming in which you take a pile of letters and toss them up in the air and take the ones that land on your lap; I was excessively fond of double fs.
I feel all warm and fuzzy when I look at this, because I can remember writing it, and I was sure it was absolute genius. For six, it's damn good-- same set of characters throughout, episodic plot but one in which stuff does happen and is resolved, forty-five pages, and I knew the words 'exalted' and 'seraph' and how to spell them. And it has bad illustrations in crayon.
You can't buy childhood memories like that.
