From the Laden Branches, a Request for Harvest

I feel a little bad every time I convince a new friend to check out Free Refills. This piece right here is the 670th I've published since I started the Free Refills project, and the vast majority of those pieces are uncategorized. I've also never created an index, and I don't do tags. If you're new here, you can wander through the few categories that do exist, but after that you pretty much have no choice but to start at the top and read backwards in time.

I've been talking about the organization of Free Refills since the autumn equinox of 2015. (Take a gander at the earliest entry in the Rules.) I've made promises, and I've 100% broken them. Free Refills is still an unorganized mess, I'm still using the default theme, and the only realistic way you can read the bulk of what's here is via reverse chronology, which kind of gets in the way of my assertion that it's not a blog, which it isn't, I promise.

Well, the autumn equinox just rolled by, which makes it harvest time, and in the face of what I just said, the obvious things to take harvest from would be all the pieces I've published and all the drafting behind those pieces. I need to read all of it. Doing so should give me a much stronger sense of just what exactly I've accomplished, and also go a long way toward giving me a starting point for organizing.

But holy shit is that going to be a lot of work. Behind these 670 pieces there are something like 650,000 words of zero drafts, which is the equivalent of six reasonable-length novels. Thankfully, I like my own writing, so I can think of worse things, but at the same time, I can't imagine reading six novels by even a favorite writer of mine in a short period of time without getting really really bored.

Well, there's not much to be done about it. If I really was writing for publication all along, as I so claimed, and not just performing some kind of perverse calisthenics for my fingers, then the professional in me knows that I gotta buck up and do the work that needs to be done. There are bound to be some genuine positives--surely somewhere in all that writing there are some seeds for pieces that I've totally forgotten about--but it's gonna be exhausting as well.

I'm choosing to see it this way: a bountiful harvest will always entail a lot of work. Don't you agree?