Put the scissors down, THEN run!

How do people segregate their lives? You put on the employee hat. Take it off, put on the parent hat. Put on the hobby hat. Put on the sports fan hat. Put on the travel hat.

Me? Epic fail. I try to keep my life in tidy, separate bins. But I'm just not a tidy person. There's a long standing joke that I am The Chosen of Kali, Goddess of Chaos and Destroyer of Egos. I don't try to destroy egos. But I ask too many questions. Corporate America doesn't like me much, so I'm guessing they must be good questions. As for chaos...

Creativity requires a mess. And messy is not just about being a poor housekeeper. Yes, every horizontal surface in my life is in perpetual danger of getting covered with strata. In the office, there's a layer of papers about Baroque dance, and a layer of papers about how to market my books better, and there's a layer of papers about possible vacations, a stack of proofread manuscript full of edits I need to make, and somewhere in there are a bunch of bills that are hopefully not overdue. The sewing room is just as bad: on the cutting table there's a 1920 coccoon coat waiting for some hand sewing, a ripped pair of jeans next to a naked doll whose clothes got shredded in the washing machine and I need to start over, a heap of printed cotton that wants to be a bustle dress next to the fabric for the jerkin that goes with the blue Henrician coat that's on the mannequin. And, since the top drawer under the sewing machine is empty, that's where all fourteen of my pairs of scissors must be.

Why do I own fourteen pairs of scissors? It's actually NOT just because my spaces are a mess. It's because the inside of my head is every bit as messy.

That thing I said about not being able to segregate the various parts of my life...well, I am a seamstress, and a writer, and a dance, and I don't know how to separate any of them.

I have been sewing since I was five years old, sewing on a sewing machine since I was in third grade. I made my first set of hoopskirts in seventh grade. And I haven't stopped sewing costumes since then. The costume closet takes up the entire basement, filled with Regency dresses for dancing at Jane Austen balls, Victorian and Edwardian dresses for attending Vintage dances, flapper dresses and poodle skirts for teaching 20th century dances, and Renaissance costumes for dancing with the cast at Renaissance festivals. My first book is set between 1875 and 1889 so that I could write about bustle dresses. One of my not-yet-finished novels is set during Queen Elizabeth's reign. Part of the reason it doesn't feel "ripe" yet is because I don't talk about EITHER dancing or clothing in its current rough draft!

I always talk about dancing in my books. Always. My first novel starts at a ball. I never figured out the significance of that until this very moment. Some critical imformation is imparted to the hero at a dance in the middle of the book. But even my modern books, when I don't get to talk about costume much, there's dancing. There has to be some, because my modern books are Jane Austen-inspired, and dancing was very important in Jane Austen's time! If you have even the most passing familiarly with Jane Austen's works, you can think of a handful of references to dancing. Dance is equally important to me, so I *have* to sneak in a reference to swing dancing, at the very minimum.

I've long said that I don't know how it's possible to be a dancer if you don't know how to sew. When I was a Scottish dancer, after I made my own costumes I knew how to help my girlfriends make theirs when they joined the dance group with me. When I started my belly dance troupe, we made all our own costumes because those sparkly costumes are expensive! When I started my Cancan troupe, I hosted "petticoat parties" because there is NO WHERE in the world you can just buy full circle petticoats with 6 layers of ruffles on them.

And, when you need to make twelve of them, there's no way I'm making 1,200 inches of ruffle per petticoat by myself! It took twelve dancers a whole lot of hours crawling around on my living room floor to create all those petticoats...and the costumes that went on top of them!

And this is why the fourteen pairs of scissors. One for each dancer, plus two pairs to be lost somewhere in the strata of fabric, half-made petticoats, pattern pieces, feathers, flowers, and strips of rhinestones. Except when six or seven pairs of scissors are missing in the chaos, and most of the dancers are sharing pairs of scissors back and forth.

Life is messy.