NOTE: THIS BIT IS NOT WRITING RELATED. SKIP DOWN IF YOU WANT TO READ THAT. After five days of work, I finally got our garage completely cleaned and organized. When we had moved in six years ago we’d stuck a LOT of stuff in there as kind of an interim storage space while we worked on getting the house put together. A month or so after we had moved in, however, my dad was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer and everything pertaining to unpacking pretty much fell by the wayside for quite some time. As the garage was pretty much “out of sight, out of mind,” we never really went in there to unpack at all.

In my defense, I did clean up the space a bit a few years ago, but I didn’t go through all the boxes, storage bins, et al to find out what the hell had been shoved where. This is what happened this week — I installed new hanging storage hardware, stabilized the homemade workbench, pulled everything out of our storage shelving units, disassembled the units, swept under them, reassembled the units and added a new one, and then went box by box until I had everything organized in a much more sensible manner (also found all of our power tools, which was a frigging blessing).

I also decided that, er, it was probably time to finish refurbing the Singer treadle sewing machine base that’s been in pieces for lo these last thirteen years, mainly so that it didn’t take up storage space anymore in the garage. If I get a move on, I may actually have the sucker done by Monday or so.

THIS IS THE WRITING RELATED BIT. While I was in mid-clean, I heard my phone tweet at me (I bring my cell phone in the garage so that I have something to read when I’m taking a break). I sat down to take said break, called up Twitter, and found to my delight that I’d won a concrete poetry mini-challenge run by my favorite blogger/artist/performer in cinema sans culottes Colby Keller. To double my delight, the marvelous Mr. Keller had recorded a short YouTube clip of himself reading my poem (which turned out to be rather challenging, as I’d done a complicated outline with my words. Poor Colby, he’s such a good sport).

One of the reasons why I’m so pleased with this is that I’ve always considered myself to be a rather crap poet. It’s the one writing form that doesn’t come easily to me, although I do enjoy reading poetry. So to win a mini-challenge like this was a nice shot of writing egoboo.

In other writing news, I’m plowing ahead with Breaker Zone and it looks like I’ll have it done and submitted by the end of May, yay! In retrospect, I really am kinda happy I took such a long break with it, because the changes in characterization I’ve made (and frankly, the improvement in my writing skills) will hopefully make it a much better book. Also, I need to get it done and off my plate so that I can get to the 22 other books on the To Be Written List. Whee!