I am the worst housekeeper on earth, or close to it anyway. I can admit this. Not with pride; I wish I did a better job, but I don’t mind sharing my lack of talent. But there is something nice about cleaning, once you’re doing it, and I do have dreams about keeping a clean and organized house one day. I have ideas for just how I want to do it. It will never be perfect, but I think I can be an OK housfrau one of these days. I really want to.

But cleaning does give me time to think, and usually its the “cleaning and sorting my life” sort of thinking. I guess they go well together. I always try to juggle too many things in my life, and the problem with that is not that I have too long a list, but that all the things I juggle are HUGE. And all of them are dear to my heart. But somehow in life, the wrong things end up on top, like my job, instead of my home, my family, my friends, my faith. I think that a lot of people make this mistake. Part of me says that if I took care of things in the right order, that everything would run more smoothly, but work is constantly running behind – behind on grading, behind on the play, behind on whatever asinine paperwork I’m supposed to be completing – that the idea of putting it further down my list sounds like a disaster.

I’m the type of person that loves to make personal schedules (work out here, work on next novel here, clean house here), and then can’t stick with them. Obviously I’m not making a schedule I can live with. But cleaning the sink made me feel, for a little while at least, that maybe I could.

I also thought a lot about writing. I have wanted to be a writer ever since I was a kid; I grew up with my nose in a book and a pen in my hand. For the last couple years I’ve finally decided to get serious about it, but, like most worthwhile things, it has been hard. I had given up on being a novelist around the age of 16 because I convinced myself I couldn’t compose an entire novel; they were just too long. But then last January I proved my 16 year old self wrong. Now I’m restructuring, reworking, retooling, re-everything-ing.

It’s interesting; when you tell people you’re working on a novel, one of the many responses is something to the effect of “Do you see all the crap that gets published? You can do it if they can.” This is, of course, meant as a compliment; someone is saying that after assessing my intelligence, they have deemed me more competent than the drivel they’ve read. I do appreciate this, I guess, and it is funny how many writers I know (myself included) that have been comforted by reading a “what-the-hell-was-everyone-thinking-when-they-paid-for-this” novel. But I realized [as I scrubbed a particularly stuck smooch of toothpaste] that that just isn’t good enough. Not only because I don’t want to waste my time tracking down the one agent and editor combo willing to publish garbage, but because I have absolutely no desire for anyone to ever say, “Well did you read that book by JC Garren? Yeah, if she can get published, so can you.” I’m better than that, and my characters deserve more than that.

So, bring on your rejections, your criticisms, and, if you have any, your compliments. I will take it. I may ignore the parts I disagree with, but I want to be good. And that means learning my craft.

I had other thoughts while cleaning the bathtub and the toilet, but I’ll save you from those.