I’m so thrilled to be joining the crew here at Murder She Writes! I can’t imagine a nicer place to  yammer and blab every couple of weeks. I write a mystery series for St. Martin’s/Minotaur about fifty-year-old Stella Hardesty, a Missouri housewife who helps women take care of abusive husbands and boyfriends. And when I say “take care of,” I mean that when Stella’s on the job, those bad boys’ attitudes get permanently adjusted.

I live in Northern California with my husband and two teenagers, but years ago, when my kids were babies, I lived in Chicago next door to a wonderful woman named Linda.

Linda did it all. She had four delightful children, cooked beautiful meals, grew heirloom roses, and volunteered for lots of worthy causes.  Linda greeted every day with flawless makeup and every hair in place.

Linda had only one teeny little flaw: her house was a little wee bit…disorderly.

Uh, that’s a polite way of saying it always looked like a hurricane had just blown through.

One day we were in the rec room and I was searching for something in her cabinets – probably one of the children we’d accidentally misplaced – and I opened the wrong door by mistake.

“Oh nooooo! Not that one,” Linda shrieked, “that’s where I keep my dirty little secrets!”

Now back then I wasn’t quite the no-holds-barred, gutter-mouthed woman I am today, and I was kinda startled. Intrigued, of course, but startled. I actually considered shutting the door and sparing my dear friend any embarassment but – well, it was just too tempting. I let the door fall open the rest of the way, and out of the cupboard tumbled the most astonishing collection of …

Well hang on just a sec. Before I tell you what was in that cupboard, let me ask you a question: when January rolls around, what’s the lead story on nearly every single women’s magazine? Is it Sexting: Not Just for Teens Anymore? Five Ways To Make Him Forget His Middle Name? Eight Erogenous Zones You Didn’t Even Know You Had?

No no no, my friends, try this:

When January rolls around, the same magazines that spend the eleven other months of the year pitching midlife va-voom have suddenly got a case of the spic’n'spans.

Yes, that’s right. In January, we don’t want fashion tips. We don’t want to be exhorted to lose those holiday pounds. We’re not in the mood for better health or well-behaved children. What we want is a place for everything and everything in its place.

And oh, friends, I fall for it every time – I decide this is the year I will GET ORGANIZED FOR GOOD.

Here are just a few of the follies of  Januarys past:

One year, I sewed coverups for all the old-fashioned sinks in my house (these don’t seem to exist in California, but back in the midwest we all had ‘em) just so I could hide clever caddies underneath that contained cleaning supplies. The idea was that I’d never have to leave the powder room to do a little impromptu sprucing because everything I needed was right there under a few yards of chintz. Instead, every time I took a comfy seat on the…y’know, I had a birds-eye view of what was really just a bucket o’ guilt dressed up in a skirt.

Another time I spent forty-five bucks on these gorgeous Italian art-paper file folders. Now I realize we’re just getting to know each other and all, and I should probably hold off on my darker secrets, particularly the ones that could get me in trouble with the IRS, but I can’t keep track of my expenses or jot down my mileage or hold onto a receipt to save my life. So I’m not sure why I figured that beautiful, unused filing system would make my tax preparer any happier than the equally-empty $1.99 job from Walgreens.

Then there was the time I decided that everything in the pantry was going into this modular storage system that fit together like DNA in a gene sequence. Tall containers for spaghetti. Big oblongs for cereal. Squat square ones for rice and beans. Blocky canisters for flour and sugar. It took me about eighteen straight hours and cost as much as my first car, and I had only managed to organize a single shelf when my husband wandered in, took one look and said “Aw, great – how the hell am I ever going to find anything now?”

Which actually brings us back to my friend Linda. The thing that tumbled out of the her cupboards? Not sex toys, or red satin teddies, or special videos she and her hubby made on their honeymoon. It was a king’s ransom of Lock & Lock, enough to store not just every morsel of food, every leftover, every teabag in three counties, but also every crayon stub, binder clip, dry-cleaning coupon, and  lego; every gift-with-purchase lipstick in a color she’d never wear; every mateless sock and mitten, cell-phone manual, hotel shampoo, and dog brush.

Not that all of those things were in the Lock & Lock. No, all of those plastic boxes were empty. But that was okay. Because what Linda was enamored with, what so many of us fall for year after year, isn’t so much organization but the potential for organization. The glorious possibility. Oh, deep down we know that the odds of us ever sorting through the sock drawer are about as high as learning conversational Mandarin or developing six-pack abs. But we still love to dream.

So tell me, in this time of resolutions and good intentions, what organizational fantasy really gets your motor running? You can tell me, sugar, just lean in close and whisper…is it California Closets? Matching spice jars with calligraphy labels? Huggable hangers from HSN? It’ll be our little secret…and just to make it fun, I’ll select one comment at random and send you a copy of A BAD DAY FOR SORRY, the first book in the Stella Hardesty series!