Clearing out the junk

Saturday I decided to clear out some of the clippings files I have, mainly the folders marked "News," "Humor," "Movies/TV/Music," and a couple of others. I was stunned at how much stuff I'd acquired, and how many clippings I hadn't read since I first saved them (Buffy's changing networks! MST3K is going off the air!). I threw out everything I no longer wanted or couldn't use.

I suppose if you're a person who collects clippings, you could amass quite few folders' worth. As I writer I have to do this; clippings can mean story ideas. Writing nonfiction, clippings are even more important because that's your research material. The more you write, the more clippings you end up with. That's why I cleared away what I did. I needed to get rid of the stuff I wasn't using for the stuff that I had to keep.

Which, it turns out, isn't such a bad philosophy for life.

I used to have lots of CDs. I'm down to about three dozen, and I may get that pared down to less than 20. I wanted to have DVDs of most of the movies and TV shows I had on videotape. Now I'm happy to have the most meaningful things on DVD, and the rest can be files on a drive. (A larger hard drive that what I have, but still.) I'm not sure I can pare down my library all that much, but that's in part 'cause I did so a couple years ago.

I don't know about you, but as I get older, I want less junk cluttering up my life.

Of course, that doesn't mean I'm going to choose between writing fiction and nonfiction. That sort of mess I can live with.