In all honesty, it doesn't appear that I did that much today, but in truth, I accomplished quite a lot. The cleaning-out and packing up has yet to cease. I hesitated on my closet because I needed more storage bins, so that project didn't begin until this evening when Kris came over with some from Target. But today I cleaned out my bathroom, wrote (on both novels!), and searched for an agent. I found someone on the internet that sounded decent--worth a shot, any way. The main catch was the inquiery for new, unpublished authors. Anyway, I'm meeting Jackie at the office Friay morning to put together a query letter. SO, we'll see. Doing all this research for an agent has got me thinking seriously about what exactly I have to publish. A play and a children's book, that's about it. My poetry collection is a mess and I don't have a decent novel finished yet. I'd do more children's stories but the illustration aspect is a bit of a roadblock. My 'style' fits a small margin of storytelling and my ideas (one fantastic one I've been dwelling on) needs a lot more than my simple drawings. I've been thinking about using my camera though; taking photos and either leaving them or manipulating them to look surreal. We shall see! I did a lot reflective cleaning today--the sort of cleaning out that always take much longer than it should because you have to stop and look through things. I've always been a binder collecter (I always fill them, too) so it was a real trip paging through those. I must have twenty or so just filled with old stories, drawings, and novels in their earliest forms. Some stories really did stay with me for years. It amazes me now, as a young adult, that something could hold a child's interest for so long. I mean, I really was a focused little girl! Looking at the progression of writing, I really became aware of the habits I developed and the early (however hidden) signs that had already predetermined what I would want to become. I have the earliest documentation of my first novels, of The Prospect, Eleven Names, Emotion Potion, and the Cupid trilogies (all horrible titles, by the way). But I think it's so cool that that stuff has survived. It's neat to look back on it, to see where my mind was going, what my creativity was developing. And then I started creating brainstorm webs, binders of info, adding pictures...visual tools; I was meant to do visual media. Anyway, it was just interesting to look back at everything, connecting the dots and seeing how everything I've done has made absolutely perfect sense. Funny how life goes, how "our calling" finds us. Carrie