Cleaning & organizing my office

This is my office in dire and desperate need of organization. (And the photo only shows a small portion of the disaster area.) Click on it to make it an even bigger mess. ; )

But before I get to the official topic of today's blog, I want to share something extremely cool that happened yesterday. As most of you know, Magic Lost, Trouble Found was one of five finalists for the Compton Crook Award for best debut Fantasy/SciFi book of the year. Mark Van Name won for One Jump Ahead. (I gotta get that book and read it!) After I went to Mark's blog to congratulate him on his win, I did some browsing around his site and discovered that our day job offices are five minutes from each other! How cool is that? I immediately emailed him and offered to take him out to lunch to celebrate his win. Mark graciously replied that he wanted to treat me to lunch as a small way of sharing the award. We had lunch together yesterday and hit it off, and had a wonderful time. : ) In his blog for today, Mark talks about some of the things we discussed. Pop over to his site, read, and enjoy!

Now back to our regularly scheduled blog -- Derek & I moved into the house that we're in a little over a year ago. I was in the final frenzy of writing Armed & Magical at that time. I told Derek, "Just tell me when the movers have to put my desk on the truck." Mere words cannot express the joy of packing (16 years worth of stuff), moving, and unpacking while finishing a book. Now, over a year later, my bookshelves are still unorganized. Derek (bless him) unpacked all of my books and put them on the shelves in the new house. I have yet to organize them according to genre, author, and series. (Yeah, I'm one of those kind of people.) I hope to get that done in the next week before the edits for The Trouble With Demons arrives from my editor.

The closet in my office is a disaster; my filing system is non-existent; and stacks of stuff that should have been filed long ago are everywhere. Needless to say, since I'm one of those kind of people, it's been driving me nuts. Or it would have driven me nuts, if I'd had time to even notice it. My sister is coming to visit this weekend, and she's going to help me organize my office and turn the closet into a wonder of organizational efficiency. In addition to being a spectacular interior decorator, my sister is an organizer guru. My work life is finally about to become organized -- I'm so excited! : ) I'll be sure and post pics when the job is done.

And for tomorrow's Saturday Fun Pics, I need your help. I recently had a photo shoot to have new headshots done for my website and promotional stuff. I've picked several photos, but I need your help deciding which one I should put on my home page. Pop in Saturday, take a look, and let me know what you think.

Coming up next week: Doing rewrites; how to push through and complete a novel; why I love "gray" characters; writing my first novel way back when, complete with photos of my first notebook -- a handwritten mess. ; )

Happy Friday!
Lisa