The Supply I Demand

by Ann

I type everything, so I don’t use a lot of office supplies. There is one item, though I can’t seem to live without. And I don’t even buy it.

Photocopy shops return large jobs in convenient 8.5 x 11 inch boxes. I keep one by each printer to store clean paper. I also have one for each manuscript. In the manuscript boxes, I store critiques and the odds and ends of novel synthesis.

The box for my previous WIP has:
* pictures of llamas
* a timeline for the Iraq war
* notes from a documentary about The Weather Underground
* a nose and glasses sticker
* a rubber band-powered paper airplane
* a calendar of January - March, 2003
* a brutal paid critique from a conference
* notes from a first pages panel
* some critiques from my critique group that have already been analyzed and incorporated. (Perhaps I could recycle those pages now.)

I could cover the boxes in fancy paper. They’d look better, but they work just as well without decoration.