Samhain Publishing Ltd Weblog

Triple the procrastination, triple the fun

My husband and I share a desk—he owns an HVAC & electrical company and I write. It’s not so bad for me, since I can take my laptop to an uncluttered space while still having a place to toss my paper scraps and sticky notes. But sometimes—usually after a three-hour hunt for some essential document—my husband tells me it’s time to clean the desk.

Desk cleaning day can be fun because it offers a triple dose of procrastination. 1) While I can pretend to plot in my head, I can’t actually write while filing, can I? 2) Since I’m stuck at the desk—and desktop—anyway, I may as well sign into IM, right? And 3) I can actually procrastinate during my procrastination by sifting through unearthed artifacts.

What kind of things lurk in the bowels of a writer’s desk piles?

• A roughly 1”x2” torn corner of notebook paper that says: Vandals would be cool—downplay lack of hygiene. I have no memory of writing it, but I must have because were my husband to have written it, I would have had to call in Chicken Little to translate.
• The registration for a car we sold five years ago.
• While filing extended warranty papers, a clause caught my eye that decrees my warranty will be void if I use my four-wheeler to deliver pizzas. Dammit, there goes Plan B.
• Sixteen pages of meticulous research on Leerjets so my Devlin Group books could feature an accurately rendered private plane. If you’ve read them, you might be thinking, “But don’t they fly a Bombardier?” Yes, they do.
• A flattened M&M wrapper containing one red M&M. Jackpot!
• Two paragraphs of In the Spirit scrawled on the back of a Wal-Mart receipt. I was able to further waste time by checking the final book to see if they made it in. They did, though not word for word. Proof of the theory that once something is written it’s easily lost, but not forgotten.
• A phone number on a sticky note I spent about two hours looking for three months ago.
• A McDonald’s french fry. Eh. Even I have standards.
• A piece of notebook paper with Chapter One written at the top and…nothing else. Yeah, got far with that one.

So you might wonder what I tossed. Well, I might write a book about Vandals someday, and I don’t want to forget the hygiene-deficiency. I might need to prove I owned that car, and I certainly need a reminder not to go delivering pizzas on my ATV. I’ll keep the Leerjet research in case the Bombardier crashes. The phone number I stuck on the monitor so it can fall off and start a new pile. The rest I threw away (after I ate the M&M).

So how does your desk/workspace/kitchen counter fare? Spotless and orderly? It’s okay. You can tell me, and I’ll still like you. If you’re a little more like me, when do you clean? The first time you can’t find something? When the piles start tilting and merging? Or when you can’t find a place to set your coffee?