Today I'm working on making new characterization sheets, which I meant to do yesterday... except that everything got side-tracked after walking by #2-son's and #4-son's bedrooms yesterday morning and totally losing it.

After a screaming fit at #2-son ("You'd better clean your bedroom or I'm going to and that won't be a pretty sight!!"), I stood over #4-son for the next 3 hours as he cleaned his room. Some parts of my help he didn't appreciate, like when I emptied his closet onto the floor. But after 4 kitchen-sized bags of trash, and 5 baskets full of dirty laundry, and things taken out that belonged other places... he has a floor! and everything has a place to go! Amazing! (Mom being snide). The cool thing, though, was when we got done and he stepped into his room to look around and he (11yo) said, "Mom! You worked a miracle!" Awwhhhh... <sniff>

Even after that, I was still on a rampage, and went to work on #2-son's room. He'd actually gotten quite a bit done, but had clearly come to the point that we wasn't sure what to do next. So, I mostly supervised, and in the next 2 hours, we got his room clean. And the miracle there was me directing and him doing... like he was a reasonable human-being instead of the hormone-crazed teenager I've been dealing with for the last three years. A miracle indeed!! Today he needs to empty his closet so he has a place to put the things he wants to keep, but I think he can do that by himself.

While this was going on #1-son and #3-son cleaned their rooms, although neither was in even close to the same state as the others. Interesting family dynamics... :-)

So, today is laundry, laundry, and more laundry. And cleaning my room. The others look so nice now that mine feels messy. :-)

And the characterization sheet... I'm not sure why it's such a big deal to have a form to fill out, beyond the fact that I'm anal about such things.

As a midwife, forms were vital for reminding us what needed to be done. And various midwives were very picky about their forms, it had to be just SO! And I made a bunch of extra money formatting up forms for my midwife friends. So, forms are my friend.

Well-made forms help me organize, they help me not miss things...

Oh! Story there! A while back, I had the same guy from Friday's lunch point out another major flaw in this manuscript: "How come the hero has a past love-life, and the heroine doesn't?" Well duh! I didn't have a place on my form for "love-life" and I was so focused on heroine's current state of mind that it never occurred to me to worry about her past... but the lack of her past really showed up as lack of depth in her character.

So, yeah, procrastination or not, in between loads of laundry I'm designing a characterization form, and viewing it as an investment in my writing career. It's not an easy task, though, since I want to have the first page to be a summary of the rest. What needs to be on it or not? What order makes sense? What do I need to know at first glance? How much space do I need for each item? What have I missed? And so on... and so on...

If nothing else, it's bound to keep me out of trouble today.