After months of being stuck inside, who would want to spend yet another day indoors dancing with mops, vacuums and the occasional dust bunny when I could be in my garden? So I have never been enthusiastic about the annual ritual of Spring Cleaning. But then this weekend, after a frightful stretch of winter weather we experienced a Spring of sorts. No snow in the forecast and a balmy 45 degrees. Since it still much too early for gardening I was struck by an urge to Spring Clean.
I decided to focus on my home office, a spot that rarely gets more than a vacuum and a quick dust. Eventually the scrubbing and polishing turned into a decision to go through the files -- a decision not made lightly. My file cabinets are crammed with years of my writing career: manuscripts, tearsheets, invoices, ideas. It didn't take long until I was surrounded by stacks of paper.
My Keep and Trash stacks were quickly joined by an unexpected but fast-growing stack: Work on This! Looking through abandoned work I kept finding things I wanted to rework, ideas long forgotten that I wanted to pursue, or a scrap of mysterious notes I wanted to decipher.
I wonder if it was the novelty of looking at what I was focused on months or years ago that attracted me to the contents of my filing cabinet. Or perhaps as years passed and I changed I could bring something new to the projects waiting in my files.
Unlike me, you may not have a dusty filing cabinet in the corner. But every writer has someplace where ideas get hidden. A box under the bed, a file in the Cloud, the last drawer in their desk. My advice to everyone is to take time to give those impossible projects one more look. Hopefully, like me you find some unpolished gems.
Do you have a secret spot for abandoned writing projects? When was the last time you sifted through it looking for treasure?
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Jodi M. Webb writes from her home in the Pennsylvania mountains about everything from DIY projects to tea to butterflies. She's also a blog tour manager for WOW-Women on Writing. Follow her journey through writing and reading at Words by Webb.
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