Staging a Room, Staging a Life

I woke up this morning and dressed quickly. I had builder reps coming to check out the insulation levels in the attic and restore them to peak level at 8AM. 

They arrived on time. I was dressed, ready and already reading my fourth MS first draft. Whew.

The new insulation was installed. Darling Daughter awakened, hung about in jammies, and I continued reading draft 1 of 4th MS.

Then off to my friend's house to help her reorganize a room in her house. I had a great time moving around her bits and pieces and telling her get rid of this, or asking "why is THIS here?" Oh, fun! We took a cluttered room and restructured it into a nice, habitable space.

Isn't that amazing? She was so happy with the results. Sometimes it takes a fresh eye to see what needs to be done with the crap we have in our houses.

Then off I drove... home to work on the reading and note taking for the revision of my 4th book. And it hit me. Sometimes it takes a fresh eye to see how to fix the crap in our stories. 

I am so glad I waited so long to fix this mess. I am so glad I have a fresh eye. I already have a better idea about where I am going to take this MS. And I am excited about it. It'll take cutting out unnecessary words, repositioning the other words, and refining the details with bits of description and prose. 

Oh my!

My friend's husband arrived home from work, looked at the room, and said to her, "Christine's hired."

I hope one day an editor reads my pages and says the same thing.

Just about A New Year and I'm Ready

It's been a crazy year for me and my family. As one person at a writing group put it, "life hijacked me." We moved. And it wasn't an easy process. I flew to the new city with my family to check it out January 2008. We found schools we liked, areas we liked, and houses we loved. We landed on January 29th back in VA and two and half weeks later my house was on the market.



I make it sound easier than it was. In a nutshell, I gave birth to a staged house. And that was a monumental effort. I learned a few things about myself:



*I can sleep in my clothes and wear them the next day to run around looking for paint to match my walls

*my personal handyman, N, had the secret to life: don't panic, I can fix it. And he did and I miss him.

*I can box up half my house and watch it drive away in storage units

*who needs comfort when they can have a model home?

*my real friends were there for me at the oddest of times

*my other friends were not real friends

*I can survive an economic downturn and sell a house in 1 month!



Then we turned around and purchased a house on the internet using a realtor my VA realtor recommended. I learned a lot from that experience, too:



*as long as you have a tough realtor, anything is possible

*you can buy a house on the internet

*you can order idiots working for builders around via all caps in emails long distance

*you can live in three places in the span of two months

*you can make a new life happen while living the old one



Then we moved into the new house and I learned:



*that if you complain, people will come through and make things right

*box cutters are a must

*wrist guards are a must

*dust? what dust?

After we moved into the house and got settled, I learned that I can:

*drive 12 hours with a teen and see my old friends
*starting a new life is easy with a positive attitude
*I am a most excellent nester

And through it all, I learned something about myself as a writer because I entered contests, placed third in one contest, and I continued to write. Now I am revising my third book and am almost at the finish line--again.

So I am really excited about the new year because this year I don't have to move. I just have to keep doing what I started, and I have more time to do it. Yeah! I am setting bigger goals for myself this year. I am going for the gold as far as time spent in front of the computer banging out stories. And I am aggressively marketing my books--again!

And now, back to revising book three.