I never finished my posts on Criteria-Based Content Analysis for writing, which feels like a metaphor for my whole life these days. Everything is half-done, messy, and unfinished. Some of those messes I simply can’t clean up right now: my ripped-up floor needs fixing but not while I’m still trying to sleep in the same room and not before I find out from the insurance company how much they will contribute. I have a $1000 deductible, so I know it’s going to cost me, but the insurance payment will be the difference between going as bare bones on the floor repair as I can and actually trying to replace it with something equivalent to what I have now.

(For those who don’t keep up with my other blogs, I had a little tiny water leak from my refrigerator that turned into a gigantic monster of a mess before it was through. Because it was a little leak, it was unnoticeable until it started seeping up through the floor in my dining room/office + bedroom-while-R-is-home-for-the-summer. The damage control guy says basically most of the floors in the downstairs of the house should be replaced, gah.)

Ditto trying to clean up some of the chaos. The floor in my bedroom is stacked high with books, because I had to move them out of the office while the floor was getting ripped up. I don’t want to put them back in the office until the floor is repaired–why move hundreds of books around if you don’t have to?–but it means just walking into my bedroom stresses me out.

And then my writing life is a cacophony of half-written and just barely begun stories. A middle-grade novel for my niece, the opening of A Precarious Balance, the honeymoon story set in Belize, the beginnings of an outline for A Gift of Grace, a random short story started when I got seriously annoyed at another book, two fanfictions that I never finished and really should–stuff galore, none of it done, none of it moving, all of it filling up my brain with incoherent thoughts and random scenes. It’s making me kind of insane. Well, more insane than I am already.

So–a plan! I want to finish something and the CBCA analysis feels like the right sort of starting place. Something to get the fingers moving, something I can complete, something structured and organized to fight against the chaos. After that, I’m going to start writing a series of posts about editing–not because I’m editing at the moment, but because I was asked about it recently and thought, hmm, yes, that does sort of seem like an obvious topic, since I know a lot about it, and actually don’t know of tons of posts about editing your own work (at least not ones that go beyond the obvious basics.) Although that makes me wonder–there might in fact be tons of posts about self-editing out there, but I probably wouldn’t have bothered to read them since it’s my area of expertise and I don’t feel like I have much to learn on the subject. Well, I’m going to write about it anyway, so I hope it will be useful to someone!

But first things first… CBCA. I shall put it in a new post so that anyone strictly interested in writing advice doesn’t have to read me blathering through all of this. After I figure out where I left off!