Paper Monsters Defeated.

You definitely want to come to my GARAGE SALE.
I just dropped off three huge bags of the LESS interesting stuff at my local charity shop, and they were completely delighted. So you'll be positively ECSTATIC with the MORE interesting stuff!

Anyway, I have moved house, and the new place has less storage space than the old one. Boxes and boxes of sketchbooks, notebooks and collected scraps moved out of the old garage into my new studio room. It felt like being smothered by a huge paper beast. I fought it for five days, first trying to cram everything into shelves, then despairing and wanting to give up my job just so I don't ever produce any more boxes full of paper. After that I started going through it all and throwing away most of it - ripping out one or two useful pages of every old sketchbook and binning the rest. I went up and down in the elevator with boxes full of torn books, and after two days of that, my studio feels like a good place to be at last. And I found a whole lot of interesting stuff hidden in these horrible, looming towers of paper.

An idea for a story I never wrote.

An odd song with a couple of good lines.

I found all the scattered parts of projects I want to concentrate on next - a few novels and a classic picture book text. And I threw away so much scribbling... it was great.

I even found some fan mail that needed replying to. I am quite bad with fan mail, I always want to reply properly and then I don't get around to it for so long that I give up because I assume the writer has moved house or grown up since. But I replied to a whole bunch today.

Anyway, here's my new studio room:

My favourite bit is that I finally got around to replacing the castors on my chair with feet. I HATE ROLLING OFFICE CHAIRS. Mostly because my feet don't quite reach the floor, and so I keep rolling away when I least expect it.