Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Cleaning house

A summer project is doing a better job cleaning out the basement than we did last summer. We're starting by giving it an hour each Wednesday afternoon and see how we're doing a month down the road. At the end of the summer, a big garage sale and 75% of the stuff down here gone. So far, so good.

This afternoon I took a big step and recycled all the masters of my various manuscripts. This amounts to less than it seems since all the stuff worth saving has been digitized and archived, but nonetheless it feels a little naked in my office without the huge pile of masters that took up a corner of shelves. I did find three screenplays I can't even remember writing, so I set them aside to read and evaluate. I also have more books to get rid of -- last summer I gave them to a grad student, this I'm giving them to a poet who tries to survive by selling used books -- and quite a few audio courses in lit, philosophy, history and whatnot (to the grad student).

It is astounding, of course, how much we accumulate without even trying. And pay the price later.

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