Filer or Piler...or Lurcher?

I apologise. This is rather hurried. Something in my early morning foggy brain told me to look at the MTW blog, read, and write comments…and then…’O No! It’s the 6^th of the Month and I’m ‘on’ tomorrow! Yikes!’

How has this happened? 

In my former life as a Chemistry teacher, I attended umpteen Insets, training sessions and professional development courses. Of the umpteen I suffered; I have fond memories of…erm…two. One dealt with the Men from Mars, Women from Venus thing and was surprisingly helpful to such a dense, analytical type like I, and the other was entitled ‘Filer or Piler?’

As with all categories, I seem to lurch from one extreme to the other, so maybe ‘lurcher’ should be added. I do love a tidy desk, sock drawer, feng shui arrangement of cups in a cupboard etc, but I find I can’t sustain this organised approach to living for more than, I dunno, a few days?

And now I am on a strict regime: no bread, no booze for 10 weeks whilst I haul my 67-year-old body towards running the Bristol 10K with a much younger daughter who will bounce round whilst I…lurch.

What has this got to do with the MTW blog, you ask?

Simply this; I have prided myself on writing 7^th of the month blogs well in advance, leaving enough time to fuss over the uploaded draft before the predetermined 6am or 7am launch. It seems that lurching has come to infect even this relatively well-organised portion of my existence.

Some excuses: Apart from the self-imposed strictures in the run up to the 10K, I’m negotiating a house move AND I’m trying to write a novel, for goodness’s sake!

The truth is that I’ve added a ‘1 hour a day minimum’ novel writing rule to my Pharisaical ‘no bread no booze’ discipline. Thus far I have slipped twice in a week. Nevertheless, I feel the wind is with me thanks to having that ‘1 hour a day minimum’ rule, lodged somewhere in my lurch-like interior, calling me onwards. It seems to be helping.

Back to the diet. Worry not, I will break it to haul out someone’s donkey stuck in a Sabbath ditch (or at a forthcoming writers’ gathering in April) and I will break the 1-hour-a-day rule in the opposite direction and indulge in a few binge-writing days where the pen virtually sings as it flies across the paper as fast as those creative thoughts arrive from Who knows where? Well one can hope.

So, in short, to summarise…are you a filer or a piler, or, like me, a lurcher?

And how does this affect your writing? Your desk?