Like most people, I have household goods I no longer use and clothing I no longer wear. I have limited storage space, and I don’t want to store this stuff anymore. So I will donate the items to an organization that can pass them on to people who need them.

I’ve also decided to part with a lot of books I’ve acquired over the last five or ten years. I’ve kept some of them because I thought I might need them for research that is no longer relevant to my projects. For example, I’m not planning to write a paranormal novel, so I don’t need books about ESP, ghosts and goblins, and other things that go bump in the night.

Most of the books I have are books on writing. I’ll keep several of them, including books on naming characters, creating characters, and self-editing. I’ll keep a humorous book titled How Not to Write a Novel, which is one of my favorites. And over several years, I bought a series of books on the basics of writing a novel. These books have a lot of good, practical advice, so I’ll keep them, too.

I learned so much about the craft of writing fiction from this series. I also learned to hone my writing skills through participation in the University of Arizona’s fiction and nonfiction writing workshops. And I learned even more about writing fiction and nonfiction from programs sponsored by the writers organizations I formerly belonged to in Tucson. If I don’t know how to write by now, I might as well give up.

But I think I do, and I’m not.