Clean Surfaces

As anyone who has been following me on Facebook knows, I've been in a frenzy of desk cleaning, file organizing, even ploughing through an 8 page password list to bring new order.

Now I'm digging into the tops of some file cabinets that have one foot piles of "stuff" that must be sorted through.  Mostly it's going to the dump tomorrow as recycled magazines.  In  2008, I had still not seen the error of my ways, because I was still saving huge amounts of computer crime articles, magazines, clipping, ideas, etc.  What is even odder is that I had begun to write a novel unrelated to computer crime.  Granted there is a missing laptop, and Lojack for Laptops, and a hacker, etc., but those are peripheral plot points, not COMPUTER CRIME.

In the back of my mind there must still have been a wild hope that something would happen, like maybe I would sell a couple of novels to bring back the necessity to write more computer crime novels.  In the meantime, however, not only did I decide not to write computer crime, I decided to get away from crime fiction completely and write other kinds of novels.

I'm still trying to sell 3 novels and will start on the 4th, but this current novel, my sixth, is set in 1928 Los Angeles area and it is not crime fiction, which is pretty liberating actually.  

Which leaves me with all this paperwork.  I already tossed a huge amount a few months ago.  Old research.  I felt like I was throwing my life away.  Nonetheless, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results, like maybe if I just wrote enough computer crime novels, someone would actually publish one.   Well, someone eventually may, but I ain't writing anymore.  This is a little awkward, because all of my writing friends are crime writers, mysteries mostly, and I still belong to all these organizations.

As I say, maybe I will sell a crime novel and it will all make sense again.  Or not.   But what is happening is that the home office is in the process of being divested of hundreds of pounds (I am not making this up) of computer crime papers.  One is always tempted to pause and read an interesting bit here and there.

No.  I would be sitting here next year at this time.  It's really a huge amount of stuff, because when I am in research mode, I am thorough.  Now I am in "throw all this useless crap out" mode, and also thorough. 

Technology changes so fast that 2008 news is probably old news which makes writing about computer crime so challenging.        

I'm happy with the clean desk and one clean file.  This will take a long time.  I have lots and lots of writing magazines to go through as well.  I think each novel generated at least 50 pounds of miscellaneous papers.   How does this happen? 

In the meantime, my poor blogs are languishing.  I haven't tweeted.  Someone said twitter will die.  I have to confess that most tweets look like gibberish,

Onward, as they say.  Westward Ho the wagons.

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