What is this “simplify” of which you speak?

I recently had a dream where I was trapped in, of all places, the Long Beach airport.  It was in some kind of post-apocalyptic seeming emergency.  A few of my writing friends and I were assembling an inflatable dingy made out of raincoats or something, we had a bunch of emergency food supplies and stuff, and we were about to embark out on the water, ready to use makeshift paddles to float our way down to San Diego.

As I was about to get on, it suddenly occurred to me:

You know, we could just drive.

My subconscious says “enough.”

I woke up laughing.  Apparently, my subconscious finally decided to weigh in on my crazy ability to complicate everything in my life.  I have a gift for making every thing way more convoluted than it needs to be.

Considering the things I’m juggling, I guess I should call it a “curse.”

Systems and starting over.

I run another website, Rock Your Writing, which covers promotion, marketing, and business concerns.  It imploded.  I tried adding something to it, and consequently screwed my coding all up… long story short, I can see the text of some of my posts buried in code, but I have not for love or money been able to extricate them.

I’ve been banging my head against the wall (and tech support) for the past two or three weeks, trying to fix this problem.  Largely because I haven’t been able to let go.  I worked too hard, for too long, to just watch those things disappear into the ether.

Letting go is the lesson.

Simplification, I’m discovering, doesn’t seem to be about restructuring.  It’s about editing.  Specifically, it’s about eliminating.  Streamlining.  Surrendering.

I’m a firm believer in Havi Brooks’ concept of fractal flowers.  Long story short, when you take care of one small thing, everything else is tended to.  Learning to edit a scene will help me learn how to simplify, say, my website.  Or my laundry process.  Everything’s related.

Take one small step, and everything moves forward.

So I’m going to let go of the past work, and start moving forward on a cleaner, more streamlined site. I’ve got a new series on the market right now, shopping as we speak.  I’ve got a trilogy hitting next year, in January.

I’m going to stop complicating the business of simplification.

Photo credit:  Ryan Somma.