First Things First

Hello Friends, now that our Author Q&A series is over, I’m back and ready to share some more fun House That Cleans Itself info. It’s been a busy time for me, and many days I hardly know which way is up. That’s why I’ve chosen to blog today on the topic of prioritizing.


See, if you’re housekeeping impaired, chances are you’re priority-impaired as well. Like me, you may often find yourself overwhelmed when you have a lot to do and not enough time to do it in. Do you often say, “I don’t even know where to start!”


If, so you might enjoy this handy trick: To get your ducks in a row, try using an online prioritizer, such as the one found here:


http://cgi.money.cnn.com/tools/prioritize/prioritize_101.jsp


(And if that one doesn’t work, just google “prioritizer” to find many more.) At first glance, this looks like a financial tool, but in truth you can use it to sort ANY list in order of priority. Every time my to-do list starts to overwhelm me, I use one of these.


I love prioritizers so much I won’t even take up the time here to explain how they work. Just trust me on this one, give it a try right now, and see what you think. Start with a simple list, like 5-10 things you really need to do, and let it work you through until it has put those 5-10 things in order of how they need to be done.


Cool, huh? Told you so!


See you next time, when I’ll tell you about the world’s first self-cleaning house.

Author Response, Part Nine

This week, author Susan Page Davis tells us all about the messy world of The Blacksmith's Bravery.

What's the neatest or messiest character you have ever created, what book did they appear in, and why did you make that creative decision?


In my book The Blacksmith's Bravery (coming from Barbour in December), Griffin Bane is a victim of the scrubbing bandit. He lives in one small room behind his blacksmith shop. It's jammed full of stuff and very messy. When his nephew comes to live with him, he's too embarrassed and overwhelmed to let the boy see his living quarters, so he boards him at the rooming house across the street.

Here is a scene from The Blacksmith's Bravery:

So far, Griff had managed to avoid taking the boy into his private quarters. Sometime he’d get around to redding up the place, and then Justin could see it. Not until.

He shoved the door open and held the lantern high. And stopped in his tracks.

“What—” His heart lurched. Had he been robbed? The place looked almost bare. The floor between where he stood and his bunk was clear. And his bunk! The covers were smooth and. . .not his covers. A quilt he’d never seen before lay over the mattress, and his pillow actually had a linen cover on it. That was odd. When did thieves leave things behind?

Justin touched his arm. “Uncle Griff? Something wrong?”

“I’m not sure.” Griffin stepped into the room and swung the lantern around slowly. The room felt fairly warm, like someone had kept a fire in the stove today. His extra wool pants and dungarees, along with his two other shirts, hung from nails on the wall. All his boxes and kegs were neatly stacked, and the shelves, while crowded, had an orderly look. He could actually see the surface of the small plank table he’d lost sight of months ago, and sitting in the middle of that table were a covered basket and a green bottle holding a cluster of dried weeds and red berries. It was kind of pretty.

“This place isn’t so bad,” Justin said. “I thought you said it wasn’t fit to live in.”

“Well, I. . .” Griffin swallowed hard. He didn’t know who’d done this, but his initial shock had faded. Now anger vied with gratitude in his heart. Insight flashed in his brain, like the sparks that flew from his hammer when he struck white-hot iron. He could get mad at the scrubbing bandit, or he could accept an anonymous friend’s act with humility. The first course would be easiest. But someone had cared about him enough to spend a lot of effort making his place nicer. And he had a feeling it wasn’t done for Griffin Bane alone.

He whipped around and eyed Justin suspiciously. Had the boy complained to someone that his uncle had farmed him out to the boardinghouse? Had he told other people the room behind the smithy was too filthy to take a boy into?

“You, uh, didn’t say anything to anyone about not liking the Fennel House, did you?”

Justin shrugged. “Don’t think so. Why would I? It’s not half bad.”

Griff nodded and looked around again. He strode to the table and lifted the napkin that covered the basket. Biscuits. And a jar of jam.

“Hmm.”

“Hmm, what?” Justin came over and looked down at the basket. “Say, those look mighty good. Did you make ’em?”

“Nope.” Griff laid the napkin back over the tempting biscuits. “I’d say we had company while we were out to the Chapmans’ ranch.”

“You mean someone brought you those biscuits while you were away?”

“No, someone brought us those biscuits.” Griffin thought he might know who. Vashti had known they’d be gone today. But how could she have done all this by herself and still made the stagecoach after lunch? He looked cautiously at Justin. “Do you think this place is too small for the both of us?”

Justin looked around. “Well. . .there’s only one bunk.”

“True. But I could build another one over the top.”

“You mean. . .” Justin cleared his throat. “You mean you’d want me to stay with you after all?”

“If you’d like that. But if you wouldn’t, you can stay over to the boarding—”

“I would!”

“Oh.” Griffin nodded slowly. “All right, then. Let’s go over and have supper, and I’ll tell Mrs. Thistle that tonight’s your last night with them. And tomorrow we’ll scare up some lumber and build another bunk. How does that sound?”

“Sounds good, Uncle Griff.”

Griffin smiled. “Great. And for breakfast we’ll have biscuits and jam.”

-Susan Page Davis

Be sure to come back next week and see the final installment in our author Q&A series!

Author Responses, Part Ten

Back again with the final installment of author responses. This time, we'll hear from Mae Nunn, author of Her Forever Family, A Texas Ranger's Family
and more.


How neat or messy is your home or office most of the time?

Somewhere between the ages of 18 and 55 and for some reason known only to God, I became a tidy freak! Don't get me wrong, though. It's not that I clean all the time or that my house is spotless. On the contrary, there are two big dogs trucking across my floors all day so hair, grass, drool and crumbs are a constant maintenance evil. There's generally a dish towel on the floor for the purposes of soaking up puddles and I keep the Dust Buster charged and at the ready for miscellaneous pickups. But doggy mess aside, I believe in a place for everything and everything in it's place. I even created a hero once who lived by that credo. Of course he fell for a slob which made for a fun story to write! Yes, I have a few piles of paper, some stacks of books and there's always a load of laundry that needs to be put away, but for the most part my home is neat. I'm the kind of person who pre-cleans before my cleaning lady shows up, which has always driven my family nuts. Now that I'm a full time author and can't afford a cleaning lady anymore, that's no longer an issue at my house! Gotta go now, there's a dust bunny on the floor and it's taunting me!


Mae Nunn
Her Forever Family, April 2010
A Season for Family, November 2010

Power in Numbers

Hi Friends, I'm having some technical problems with my author housekeeping Q&A's, so no new entry today. But be sure to come back next week when all should be straightened out.

In the meantime, I thought I'd share this photo, which I took the other night at my youngest daughter's high school graduation:



Just to tie this in to housekeeping, let me say for the record that all of those caps made a big mess on the field, of course, but that was okay because of the adage "many hands make light work." Once the ceremony was over, it didn't take long for the detritus of the entire event to be broken down, cleaned up, and put away, simply because a number of people pitched in to help.

Can you do some "group cleaning" this week? Why not set a timer for 15-30 minutes, assign tasks, and put the troops to work? There's power in numbers, especially when it comes to cleaning. Once the timer dings, put away your supplies whether you're finished or not, and focus on enjoying your family instead.

And remember: There are more important things in life than dust and clutter, namely those little ones who make all of that dust and clutter! Enjoy them while they're still there with you, because before you can blink you'll be taking pictures just like this one. Trust me, I know.

I'm just glad that I was able to convert my home into a House That Cleans Itself while my kids were still young, so that I didn't waste one more precious minute agonizing over the mess. As you work on your own conversion, I wish the same for you too, that you'll be able to get a handle on the housekeeping problem so you can move on to far more important matters: the people with whom you share that house!

See you next week.

We Interrupt Your Regularly Scheduled Program…

...to talk about this fall’s American Christian Fiction Writers Conference.

To my regular readers: Though today’s post is aimed primarily at aspiring writers, keep reading! You might find an interesting tip or two that will help you keep your office or paperwork tidy. And be sure to come back next week, when we continue our ongoing series of Q&A’s with other authors about housekeeping.

If you’re new here: You must be wondering why today’s link for the ACFW blog tour has brought you to a website about cleaning. That’s because I’m an author of both fiction and nonfiction and it just so happens that one of the classes I’ll be teaching at the conference, Tracking the Details, relates well to both writing and housekeeping.

Allow Me to Explain...

When my first book came out about 10 years ago, it was #1 in a series of 5. Though each book focused on a different mystery, the characters were the same throughout, with an overriding romantic storyline that arced across all five books.

Because I was new at this business of writing, it didn’t dawn on me right away the sorts of problems I would begin to encounter as my series progressed. Namely, I never thought to make notes about any of the details of my characters—hair and eye color, street names, what they called their grandparents, etc.—assuming I would be able to keep all of that minutia stored in my brain. Yeah, right. By the third book in that series, I found that I was wasting at least an hour a day combing through books #1 and 2 in search of previously-established facts both mundane (the name of my main character’s high school) and significant (the kind of car driven by my love interest.) By the 4th book, the whole process had become even more time-consuming. By the 5th, well, let’s just say if I could have all of that time back I could watch every episode of all eight seasons of 24.

Though I knew I would be sad to tell these characters goodbye, my main emotion upon finishing the final book in the series was relief. Never again would I have to flip back and forth through previous releases in search of the name of the neighbor’s poodle!

When I started on my next series, I was determined to find a better way to track all of those stupid details as I went. There were many different systems to choose from—file-based, spreadsheet-based, notebook-based, charts, etc.—that figuring out which one was best wasn’t easy. In the end, the most important truth I learned was this: Whether you’re writing a standalone book or a series of a hundred, you must establish a system for tracking details but it must be a system that works with your brain.

If you’ve read my book The House That Cleans Itself or have spent any time on this blog, you know that my whole message is about finding the systems that aren’t necessarily the “best” but rather those that are best for you, that work best with your own natural inclinations.

Narrowing it Down

That’s why I always begin this particular lecture with a simple test, one that I created to help my students figure out which type of brains they have. You may be a “horizontal thinker,” a “digital creator,” a “tactile maintainer,” or something else, but figuring out which one you are is the first, best step in establishing a detail-tracking system that will work for you.

Once you know that, we discuss the various types of details that need tracking (hint: there are more than you think) and then we cover the specifics of the various systems available, indicating which systems work best for each brain type.

It’s a lot packed into an hour, but every time I teach this particular class, the feedback is incredibly enthusiastic—not because I’m something special or that I have unveiled some miracle plan that no one has ever thought of before, but simply because my students have begun thinking about the many ways they can work with their brains rather than against them to get their details—and maybe even their lives—in better order.

A Killer Quote

For example, here’s a quote that I love to share whenever I teach this class, because as I do I can see the “lights” turning on inside certain heads across the room:

“When I put something in a file, I never see it again. The problem isn't that I can't find it (although that has happened), but that I don't look. I am constitutionally incapable of opening a filing cabinet and fishing out a half-finished project to resume working on it.”
—John Perry, A Plea for the Horizontally Organized

Isn’t that great? That’s me to a “T”, which can make this business of being a writer a very messy process indeed. After 14 books, I think that without my detail-tracking systems, my office—and my brain—would’ve exploded by now!

The Perfect Desk

Whether you’re a writer or not, I hope you’ll take some time to think about the various systems you use (or don’t use, for that matter) to track the details in your life. Are you an out-of-sight-out-of-mind sort of person? If so, then I urge you to find ways to keep things more “visible” around your home. Use clear storage containers, never opaque or cardboard. Hang bulletin boards where you’ll see them, but also where you can conceal them when you want to, for example on the insides of cabinet doors.

One of my favorite tools is my glass-over-wood desktop, pictured here as it looks in the store:


and here as it looks in my office, in full use:



I got it at IKEA a few years ago and have found it to be the perfect solution for my needs. When I’m working on a book, I can cover my desk with character lists and timelines and house plans and more, but because this information goes under the glass, it’s always there and always handy but without getting in my way. When I’m not working on a book, I’ll use that space for other important items, such as to do lists, computer keyboard shortcuts, calendar printouts, eyeglasses, etc.

Don’t Miss This Conference!

If you are a writer, I can think of a hundred different reasons you should come to the ACFW conference (whether you’re interested in my particular lecture or not, lol.) I sincerely hope that you’ll come and take advantage of this amazing event and all that it has to offer. To learn more about it or to sign up, visit the ACFW website.

Thanks so much for stopping by my blog today. If you’d like to learn even more about how to turn your home into a House That Cleans Itself, be sure to come back again next time.

To my regular readers, I hope today’s post has inspired you to think about your own natural inclinations/shortcomings/strengths/thinking styles and how you should always keep these things in mind when applying systems throughout your home.

Blessings,

Mindy

Author Responses, Part 8

Stephanie Grace Whitson is our author this week. She's the mastermind behind Sixteen Brides, A Claim of Her Own, and many more excellent books. (My personal favorite is her captivating "Prairie Winds" series, which was first recommended to me by my mother.)

If you could invent a machine that accomplished one single
housekeeping task in your home, what would the machine do?

Gobble dust bunnies from beneath the furniture, munch on the clods of dried mud that fall off my construction worker son's work shoes inside the back door, slurp up spills before they can dry on the kitchen floor, and creatively and continuously vacuum, clean, and polish every floor in the house whether its hard wood, tile, or carpet. The machine would also maintain itself without my being required to replace filters or tanks full of crud. And it would do stairs.

When you create fictional characters, do you ever deal with their
level of housekeeping ability and/or their tolerance for mess?

I was very tempted to do this in my new release Sixteen Brides, since my characters live in a sod house. I've read some amazing, terrifying, and hilarious stories about what it was like to keep house in a soddy, all of which make me grateful I live in 2010 instead of 1870. Toads, rattlesnakes, bull snakes, mice, dirt floors, and wood-burning stoves just don't have all that much appeal for me.

What's the neatest or messiest character you have ever created?

In A Claim of Her Own, the heroine has to adjust her expectations markedly in this regard. She ends up living in a miner's tent on a gold claim near Deadwood, South Dakota and, as it turns out, the biggest housekeeping disaster she has to face ends up being a turning point in the plot. It has to do with a lot more rain and mud than Mattie would ever willingly cope with.



Thanks, Steph! And if y'all will pardon me for bragging on a friend, I just have to share the news of Steph's incredibly talented daughter, Shannon LaBrie. Shannon is a singer and songwriter, and her song "Calls Me Home" was recently featured on the TV show One Tree Hill. I downloaded the song from iTunes out of curiosity--and loved it so much that it's already worked its way into my "Top 25 Most Played" songs. Congrats Shannon, for a your much-deserved success.

Congrats, too, to Steph, who is no doubt one proud Mama right now!

Author Responses, Part Seven

Here's more of my Q & A with Jane Kirkpatrick. Enjoy!

If you could easily afford to have a full time or live-in housekeeper, would you want one? Why or why not?

No. I like my alone time with my husband and we have someone who works for us on the ranch so always have someone here everyday and I really would like to have private time. Having someone come in now and then, that would be great! But I’d have to clean up first.

Describe the state of your office right now. Be honest: How good or bad is it?

It’s pretty bad. I’m on final deadline and reference books and other items are strewn around. Notes of revisions I need to make are tacked to the computer; the church bench behind me holding reference books is now double stacked so I can just turn around and grab and not lose time going to the bookcase! I haven’t unpacked my retreat leading boxes either; they’re stacked. And since I just had a new book come out, the file boxes for that book have also not been put away as I might need to reference something in an interview, for example.

Thanks, Lenora, for your input--and your honesty. I think deadline time is the messiest time for every writer's home, or at least for their office. I know it is for me! And though I'm no fan of cleaning, there's something incredibly satisfying about putting my life back together again after having written "The End" on a manuscript and sending it off to the publisher. Here's hoping you'll reach that point soon yourself!

Author Responses, Part Six

This week, Jane Kirkpatrick, author of the Portrait of a Heart series (which includes An Absence So Great: A Novel (Portraits of the Heart) pictured above) gives us insight on going from messed to blessed.

If you could invent a machine that accomplished one single housekeeping task in your home, what would the machine do?

It would automatically go along the cracks between our oak floor boards (lovingly laid by hand but before the wood totally dried so the boards shrunk through the years) and pick up all the dog hairs, dust etc. that accumulates there between vacuum cleanings and kills my back bending over to get them. I have my closest friends agreed that if they outlive me, before the funeral, they’ll come to my house and clean out the cracks so no one will know we lived with such filth.

When you create fictional characters, do you ever deal with their level of housekeeping ability and/or their tolerance for mess? How does that factor into the story as a whole?

Yes! Being overwhelmed by clutter is a good indication of someone’s struggle with “weighty” issues, perhaps avoiding dealing with loss (can’t throw anything away) or feeling unworthy (keeping things and fearing that getting rid of them means getting rid of themselves) and other factors. Of course it’s also a great tension building (The Odd Couple comes to mind) between characters as well.

What's the neatest or messiest character you have ever created, what book did they appear in, and why did you make that creative decision?

For All Together in One Place , I created Adora, an older woman on a wagon train whose husband dies along with the other men on this train. She was very cluttered, messy about her person, too. Her husband had always told her what to do and took care of her and in some ways she was subtly resisting his control by being messy. But after he died, her cleaning up and clearing out became something she wanted to do. She ended up keeping a knife sharpener, though it was very heavy, that she had initially thought they should bring with them. This became her occupation when they reached California, so how her housekeeping (or wagon-keeping) changed was a metaphor for her own changes.

For more about Jane Kirkpatrick, be sure to check out her website.

Author Responses, Part Five

This week, Lenora Worth gives us two original shorts on housekeeping.

Invent a fictional housekeeper and create a scene involving that character.

I see a Granny-type who loves to nurture and clean, quiet to efficient
and non-intrusive.

Aunt Thelma worked her way around the outer perimeters of my office,
her sturdy SAS shoes whispering across the carpet with vaccum-cleaner
precision. The whish of her feather duster spoke louder than any words.
She did not approve of my messy ways, but far be it from her to ever
speak a word of criticism out loud. Aunt Thelma let the smell of Lemon
Pledge speak for her. That way, the sharpness of her disapproval
lingered in the air with a citrus-sweet smell long after she'd pranced
out of the room.

What are your greatest strengths and weaknesses with regards to housekeeping? As a creative person, do you ever tackle these issues in a particularly creative manner?

I have a plaque on my kitchen wall that states "Creative minds are rarely tidy." I think that says it all. My strength--I don't like filth. My weakness--I don't mind clutter.

Take this starter and keep going: Sally stood in the doorway of the kitchen, dismayed by the mess that greeted her there...

Sally stood in the doorway of the kitchen, dismayed by the mess that greeted her there. How had things fallen apart so badly so fast? She had to clean it up but didn't even know where to begin. Shoulders sagging as she reached for the broom, Sally couldn't help but think that if she had a man to help her around here, things would be so much better.

The loneliness of moving through this messy room hit her each time she looked at the stack of dirty dishes, all from dinners for one. She'd be more inclined to clean this place if someone else actually ever saw it.

Take this starter and keep going: Jared knew Beth was the girl for him the moment he laid eyes on her impeccable...

Jared knew Beth was the girl for him the moment he laid eyes on her impeccable kitchen. Everything was so perfect, so precise. She had even color-coded the containers for cereal, flour, sugar, rice, and pretzels. He loved pretzels. And he liked order. But when he saw one of the matching dish towels settled a bit crooked on the oven door, Jared felt a twinge of anger, followed by a harsh regret. So she might not be perfect after all. Maybe he could help her along with improving that a little bit.

Awesome! Thanks, Lenora!

Author Responses, Part Four

More from Lenora Worth this week, including an excerpt from the book she's currently writing.

If you could easily afford to have a full time or live-in housekeeper, would you want one? Why or why not?

I don't think I'd ever have a live-in housekeeper. I like my privacy
too much and I don't like other people going through my "stuff." But it
would be nice to have someone come in once a week maybe.

Describe the current state of your office. Be honest: How good or bad is it?

I've been trying to clean my office for days now. It always get messy
toward the end of a book being written. It's cluttered but I have
little organized spots so I can at least attempt to find things. I
don't like it too neat. That kind of scares me. But I can handle only
so much clutter before that gets to me, too. I like a good balance.

Provide a brief excerpt from one of your books that shows a scene involving housekeeping/mess/cleanliness.

From Let's Make a Deal (working title) Harlequin
SuperRomance--January 2011--Lenora Worth

Letting out a groan, Jane Harper looked up from her now ruined black
Italian leather “client-meeting” pumps to the two-storied whitewashed
farmhouse sitting with forlorn loneliness up on the hill in front of
her. At least she was here now. And from the looks of the place, she’d
be here a while. The yard was weed-covered and drought-thirsty. An old
International tractor sat lopsided near a giant live oak on a hill,
looking like a petrified bug. The steps were cracked, the porch paint
was peeling. And the porch was lined with several pieces of vintage
wicker furniture and Victorian plant stands, along with exercise
equipment and piles of various brands of empty beer cans.

Author Responses, Part Three

Our next author, Lenora Worth (her 2010 release, Hometown Princess is shown above) was full of great answers about housekeeping. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I did.

If you could invent a machine that accomplished one single
housekeeping task in your home, what would the machine do?

I'd invent some kind of machine that could wash, fold and put away
clothes. I seem to always be behind on the laundry.
Maybe a machine where you put them in and they go through the whole
process on a conveyor belt--start to finish!

Mindy's note: It exists--or nearly so. In a future blog post, I'll tell about a behind-the-scenes tour of a cruise ship that my husband and I took last fall. In the laundry room, we watched in awe as a worker put sheets and towels from the washer onto a conveyor belt, which brought them through a single machine that dried, pressed, and folded them!

When you create fictional characters, do you ever deal with their level of housekeeping ability and/or their tolerance for mess? How does that factor into the story as a whole?

Sometimes, I'll have one character who is extremely neat and pit that
character against a slob. Or I'll show my character cleaning the house
while fretting about something or just dumping everything into a corner
so she can go for a long walk and talk to God. I think it's important
to show such traits to round out the character and give the reader a
sense of that character's quirks and reality.

What's the neatest or messiest character you have ever created, what book did they appear in, and why did you make that creative decision?

In a book I just finished, the heroine is a life coach who "trains"
people to organize their homes. I put her up against a retired NFL
football player who's having a mid-life crisis and has allowed clutter
in both his home and in his head. It was fun, but it was also a tough
book to write because his emotional clutter really was causing him to
hoard things in order to built a wall around himself.

Great answers. Thanks, Lenora!

Author Responses, Part 2

Here's more from author Jill Elizabeth Nelson. This week, at my request, she has provided us with a brief excerpt from one of her books that shows a scene involving housekeeping/mess/cleanliness, etc. Jill says:

My April release, Calculated Revenge,doesn't contain any such scenes, but my October release, Legacy of Lies,is littered with them. (Pun intended.) The snippet I picked is from a scene where the main male character, the local police chief, takes off-duty hours to help the main female character set her grandmother's house to rights after an official police search that created havoc in the household.



An unsmiling Nicole opened the front door to him. He followed her through the foyer into the living room. Most of the furniture remained out of place.

"I'll put your muscle to work with that to start with." She motioned toward the couch that stood kitty-corner in the middle of the room.

Rich moved toward the piece of furniture. Nicole darted ahead of him and grabbed the far end. Together they put the couch back in its place then worked steadily to set the rest of the room to rights. She must really be skittish of him because she didn't talk except to give directions and kept her distance.

"I'm done in Grandma's bedroom and mine," she said, "but not much else. How about you take the dining room, and I'll tackle the kitchen."

"Sounds like a plan." What else could he do but let her be the boss?

Over the next few hours, they worked through the house, room by room. Nicole always made sure they weren't in the same room. Accidentally or on purpose? Rich battled disappointment that she seemed determined to hold herself aloof. But wasn't that a good thing? Hadn't he determined a similar course of action where the attractive Nicole Mattson was concerned? Why couldn't he convince his heart to chalk her up as a missed opportunity?

They finished the last rooms on the second floor and then met in the hallway. Nicole eyed the open doorway to the attic as if a monster might emerge from the stairwell at any time.

"We might as well get this over with." She marched toward the attic.

Rich hurried after her. So that's what had been bugging her. Of course! She'd have to face the spot her grandmother had lain bleeding. The stain would still be on the floorboards.

"Just a minute," he called.

Oblivious, Nicole charged ahead and started up the stairs just as Rich reached the bottom. On the third step, she let out a sound like a half sigh, half sob and went limp. Her body collapsed backward. Exclaiming, Rich lifted his arms and caught her. The impact of her slight frame drove him a step backward.

Cradling her limp form, he lowered her to the floor. Nicole was out cold.

For the Birds

Author Responses, Part 1

The authors have responded! Here's some of what Jill Elizabeth Nelson, author of Calculated Revenge, had to say to two of my questions.

If you could invent a machine that accomplished one single housekeeping task in your home, what would the machine do?

My machine would sense when crumbs have dropped to the floor or something has been spilled and automatically rush over and clean up the mess. Ummm, you know what? I think I've just invented The Family Dog!

If you could easily afford to have a full time or live-in housekeeper, would you want one? Why or why not?

If I could easily afford a housekeeper, I could no doubt easily afford my dream home. (I dream big.) In that case, I would definitely be interested in a full time housekeeper, though maybe not a live-in. I'd like total privacy at least some of my day. Even now, I'd enjoy having a part time housekeeper--maybe once or twice a week for a few hours. Since I hold down a full time job outside the home, as well as writing a couple of books a year, I would have no trouble keeping busy with my life minus the housework. I do the sweeping, dusting, vacuuming, mopping things because my aversion to filth is greater than my dislike of tedious household chores. But if I could pay someone to take care of those tasks--thus providing gainful employment to another human being--that would be a win-win situation.


Stay tuned for more thoughts on house cleaning from Jill Elizabeth Nelson. Here's the cover for Calculated Revenge, one of her exciting suspense novels for Love Inspired.

Deadline Time

Here's a little irony for you: Just as the flowers are starting to bloom and birds are tweeting and the earth is waking up and animals are coming out of hibernation, I'm about to do the opposite. Thanks to an impending book deadline, I am now going INTO hibernation. I'll be fairly incommunicado for a while as I focus almost exclusively on finishing my next book. Sounds odd, maybe, but actually it's one of the most fun parts of what I do. Hibernating to write lets me turn off the noise and the distractions and focus solely on my craft.

However, I didn't want to leave you hanging here on the blog without any new entries, so I have made arrangements for a really fun treat instead. As you may know, though I wrote The House That Cleans Itself, I am primarily a fiction author. Yesterday, I put out a call for help to my fiction author friends, providing them with a list of housekeeping-related questions for them to ponder and then post about here. Why them? Because they're an enormously creative bunch and they really know how to think outside of the box. And isn't thinking outside of the box one of the key elements for creating a House That Cleans Itself? I've already gotten some replies, and over the coming weeks, this blog will feature my questions and their answers--some of which are hilarious, some of which are serious, and all of which are awesome.

So be sure to come back next time to see how they responded to my first question, "If you could invent a machine that accomplished one single housekeeping task in your home, what would that machine do?" If you'd like, please use this blog's Comments to post your response to this question as well!

In the meantime, in honor of spring, I thought I'd share two photos that I took this morning on my front porch. I was trying to water the flowers...



but just like a Cracker Jack box, there was a surprise inside!



Isn't God great?

HAPPY SPRINGTIME TO ALL