Of Sharing and Clutter

Thanks again to the organizers of last night’s IABC Professional Independent Communicators (PIC) meeting in Toronto last night. I had a lovely opportunity to talk about “Shades of Teale” and I signed a number of copies of the novel. Congrats to designer and marketing strategist Tom Hedges for winning the draw for a copy of my book…I’m thinking it might be one his wife might read first?  😉

I’m looking forward to attending the next PIC meeting as well where the speaker will be helping us out with organizing our cluttered hard drives.  I will be hanging on her every word – I have old digital copies of my manuscript mixed in with goodness knows what else and the mess I’ve made of my computer filing system is humbling.

As I mentioned  in my talk last night, I started dreaming about writing a novel when I was eight years old —  but life was busy and as the years went on I put that dream aside to focus on more practical matters. Eventually I reached a stage in my life where I realized I wasn’t getting any younger, in fact I began to realize, as my mother has often said, that  “this ain’t a dress rehearsal.”  I reluctantly admitted that if I wanted to make my biggest dreams come true I needed to put my heart into them right away.

I didn’t waste a minute and within months I was pregnant with my family’s fourth child (a fifth and final baby followed sometime thereafter).  And then I got down to work on my novel. The baby was finished in nine months; the book took 13 years.

Starting and finishing – two themes that thread their way through everyone’s lives I guess. And although I often think I should “do something” about my hard drive I’m not always sure exactly what that “something” might be. Hopefully next month’s meeting PIC will give me some answers!