Boxing Up The Southern Reach

I can't even tell you what it feels like to box up the entire Southern Reach trilogy--every last major draft, print-out and handwritten scrawl, every notebook and scrap of scribbled inspiration. But it's done because it needs to get out of the house and into storage just as a de-cluttering issue. And after I took this photo I found another box full of Annihilation drafts I'd forgotten about. A total of three years of work including touring behind the novels--the proverbial blood, sweat and tears.A fair number of notes and scene fragments are written on torn-out pages from an advance copy of Colson Whitehead's Zone One. Loved the novel, but found myself in a situation where I had no paper and needed to write some stuff down. And, yes, there are also some notes written on leaves, while I was out hiking and ran out of anything to write on. (I've written a behind-the-scenes tell-all that will appear some place very cool in the next couple of weeks.)I'm happy to have tamed this monstrosity--if I'd left it longer, I think Area X would've formed in my office. Here's what it looked like yesterday: