Clean Up in Aisle 11!

Facts for context:

1. I still live at home with my parents.
2. At 23, still living at home with my parents, I still sometimes act like a teenager.
3. Teenagers aren't always known for tiny bedrooms.
4. I moved from the biggest bedroom in the house to the smallest.
5. I made that move in a day.
6. At one point, I had no floor-space because everything was dumped in the room.

All of that in mind, you will be please to know that I have actually tidied my room! This might not seem like such a big deal, but when you look at how I was living up until a few days ago, you'll see why this is so important for me.

For me to access my desk - which is where I sit when I'm using my laptop to write, or record/edit videos, or do anything else laptop-related - I had to:

1. Move everything off the floor and onto my bed, to access the chair. This included: a laptop bag, a backpack, two cameras, a portable DVD player, three boxes (two of which were empty!), a pile of books, a bag of stationary, a pile of folded up jeans, a pile of sheets and printed articles, and a birthday present.

2. With my access to the chair secured, I then needed to move a laptop tray from the chair. However, on this laptop tray was a pile of: magazines, notebooks, newspaper supplements, folders of various sizes accessories for the DVD player, and a belt. This required moving two, increasingly wobbly, piles of items to the bed.

3. With the chair cleared, I then had to move a pile of notebooks from the desk to - you guessed it - the bed, so I would room on the desk for just about anything else.

All in all, it took at least five minutes to do it, and I had to put it all back at the end of the night to get into bed. That's not good. That's very much not good. The amount of effort it took to access my desk meant that I didn't even bother half the time. Translation: I didn't use my laptop an awful lot of the time. This is the primary reason I didn't finish my novel last month, because I had created a physical obstacle to work.

So, I fixed it. I still have the laptop tray on my chair, but it now only holds the cameras and the DVD player. One easy move. If I want to clear the floor, I only have a couple of bags to move - one of which contains the birthday present, which won't be around for much longer. I can now easily access my laptop. But I didn't stop there.

Because I had to clear the way to the laptop, it meant I also had to put a lot of stuff away. Every magazine is now stored properly under my bed. In fact, everything that didn't belong in the open, has been put away, and my bookshelves have been re-organised.

The process took me just over an hour - because I was rushing to finish by noon yesterday - and it means I can now easily find my books on business, personal development, writing, and mental health. Plus, all the fiction I want easy access to is either on the main shelves, or on the easiest to of the secondary shelves at the end of my bed. (Those books can't really be seen, because of how close the shelves are to the bed. Which is where a lot of the books I wanted to access were stored!)

All in all, the room feels cleaner, I can relax more easily in it, and I know that whenever I want to read a book from my shelf, I don't have to look very hard to find it. I may still sometimes act like a teenager, but finally I'm starting to treat my bedroom like I'm an adult. And by bedroom, I mean bedroom-cum-office. I think I'm going to need a bigger room.

Day 11: Room Changes

Today, I spent most of my time in my bedroom. Unfortunately, my laptop was in the kitchen, so you can bet I wasn't writing. Instead, I was rearranging my room for the first time since I moved up there in January 2012.

My bed has been moved so that I'm looking at the skylight, which freed up a lot of space elsewhere. I lost floor space, but I don't really use my floor for anything other than an Unofficial Dumping Ground. So that's not going to happen as much or as easily anymore. There's also talk of getting a new bookshelf in there, so that'll solve the problem of space.

Fun, right?

Well, yes and no. I'm glad the room is being changed around. I'm glad to be having more space. I just wish we hadn't been in the middle of a heat wave when I had to do it. (It was do it myself or attempt to do it with my mum trying to help; my room was barely big enough in terms of head space for me to have done it. I could not have rotated the bed with her also there, and it wouldn't have made actually moving furniture any easier. So, I waited until she was out of the house to do it, and she got to go out in the sun when she got home instead of baking in the attic. I stayed there to continue cleaning and moving things that weren't my bed.)

Aside from the heat, there was also the problem of not writing. As I'm sure you might have guessed, that's not fun for someone who's behind on his word count.

End result: I need to write five and half thousand words tomorrow to stick to my 2K-per-day (as an average) rule. First thing in the morning, I'm making space on my desk. Second thing, I'm moving my laptop upstairs. Then I'll be setting myself targets for every half hour until I've reached my target.

Considering I can write pretty quickly, I think I might be able to get this done before dinner time (unless dinner time is lunch time, in which case, later than that.) After that, I'm one massive step into The Blood of Leap. However, even at this stage in the book, I can see I'm going to have some length-trouble again. I can also foresee a remedy for that, which doesn't involve adding a chunk to the end of the book. This is actually utilizing something already in the plan, not something I missed.

I'm actually kind of excited about that, because it's a way to introduce something more fully that I'd wanted to write about for a long time. So that's fun. I think I actually thought about it while cleaning my room.

Anyway, that's happened. I like when these books surprise me. The plans for The Hounds of Hell and The Blood of Leap have been written for a long time, so I haven't really had a chance to consider them up until recently. I didn't think about what was missing or if there was enough detail. I wrote the plans, and then I intended to write the books. That was around...May? (I'm just going to go check an email...) Nope, not May. March. I wrote the plan in March.

So, I'm getting surprised quite a bit. It's kind of a "Why didn't I do this?" kind of feeling. Which is where I'm going back to the bedroom, at that little tangent, to something else I wondered why I didn't do before: start saving coins in my jar again.

You might recall (unless you're new here - hello!) that last September, I was saving for a tablet. I was putting money in a jar every week, pouring every coin I had in my wallet inside. I had a goal.

For some reason, even though I've been quote-unquote saving for a camera, I haven't actually been saving. My bank account has gone down frequently. I've spent money because I had it (though that's not to say I've had a lot.) But I wasn't saving anything, and I wasn't getting any closer to my camera. So, I put about €19 in there today in coins that I had laying around.

Take that savings jar. Take it and like it.

Now, it'll take a while to save the money I need for a camera like that, so obviously I'm going to have to start budgeting my money properly again. (Yuck.) But it's a case of putting €20 aside every week. Given the fact that most of my friends work so we rarely get to meet up, it's actually fairly easy to not spend money, if I just gave that a shot every once in a while.

The most I ever spend on comic books in a week is €20. That might seem like a lot, but that's when everything seems to come out all at the same time. I also go to the cinema, and if I stopped buying sweets (okay, chocolate) not only would I be doing my health some good, I'd save a few euro per week. It would only cost me €10 per visit (and that's also a chance to see friends, so yay for a social life!) In terms of books... not to sound like my mum, but I have enough of them to last me a while.

Okay, even I can't believe I won't buy books. But let's look at it this way: three books I've wanted for a long time are on their way to my house because I had money on an O2 card and wanted to clear it off so I would no longer be under any hold by it. And I have the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy to read. And Game of Thrones. (Just the first book in that series...but also the fourth paperback... long story.) But I have a lot of books I want to read, and as near as I can tell, there isn't much coming out soon that I want to read. (Okay, so Darren Shan's Zom-B series has a new book every few months... shut up. And Roddy Doyle is releasing The Guts and that has Jimmy Rabbitte Jnr in it and I want to read it and shut up... I'm talking to myself here.)

Even still, I'm not exactly rolling in the money. But I do have some put aside to finally sort out the Things I need to clear my taxation with the IRS and finally start receiving money from Amazon. And there's actually money there. Though, and this is the real kick in the teeth, it'll take a while for me to get it. The IRS will take about 8 weeks to process my forms. Effectively two months. Amazon can take up to 60 days to send me a payment. Another two months. By that calculation, I'll have the first royalty check in time for Christmas presents. While that's not putting me any closer to owning a camera now, it's finally clearing me up to earn money from my books. Even if it takes a while to get to me.

This started with room changes and barely spoke about the book... um...

Okay, so NaNoWriMo is fun, and all that, but I can really understand how life starts getting in the way of it, even when you don't seem to have much to do. From the outside looking in, I have five days off per week and no other commitments. And yet, I've been finding it difficult to actually get to my laptop to write. (Incidentally, once I actually get to my laptop, I've been quicker this month at actually getting to work than I have been for the last eleven months, so that hasn't been a problem.) I just happen to have a lot going on in life that I don't talk about online, but it takes up a lot of time in my day. The room change is part of that.

I've been cleaning it for a while now, sorting through notes, finding things I thought I'd lost forever (like, thrown out completely) and generally getting stuck doing it for hours, because there's a lot of stuff that needs going through from the past four years. A lot of stuff was just moved up to the attic without me looking at first when I moved up there, and I haven't paid this much attention to all that sort of stuff since. Yes, in a year and a half I haven't done a clear-out of stuff. That's because I've mostly considered the stuff that's been thrown out recently to be important for college. (As it happens, a lot of it wasn't. It met the recycling bin. It was magical.)

This has gone on too long, hasn't it? Anyway, the short version of this is: I didn't write nearly as much as I wanted to today, so I get to pay for it tomorrow.