Tuesday, February 24, 2015

Dis Organization

Moving ever onward, I started back to work the morning of my book launch (Dying Embers launched February 13th - in case you weren't following me then or weren't around my other blogs, FB, Twitter, etc.)  The first order of business was to input the WT edits I'd made notes for back in December.  Now that that's done, though, I'm looking around for something else to do.  Which led me to look through my notebooks in search of another set of edit notes I'm sure I made once I got the notes done for WT.  These were for Bloodflow. 

Now, let me explain something... or rather sum up... I have a bunch of 5-subject college ruled notebooks laying around the house.  Each one has different stuff in it - with no real rhyme or reason to any of it.  Whatever notebook happens to be handy and still has empty pages, I use whenever the mood to write or edit or ponder strikes me. 

Over the weekend, I grabbed the full one looking for those notes and realized I have no clue what's in any of these suckers.  In the interest of figuring things out, I took a pad of sticky notes and used them to denote which pages had which story.  Any pages not pertaining to a specific story, I ripped out (jotting down anything important therein). 

Now I have three notebooks with yellow papers sticking up out of them, all with book titles.  And I still haven't found the edit notes I am... was... sure I made.  I've got one more left, but I'm beginning to doubt whether I made those notes at all or whether I made the notes for another book and only THOUGHT I made notes on Bloodflow. 

I do that sometimes - think about doing something so much that I think I actually did it.

Anyway, I'm not the most organized person in the world, but I'm trying.  Still, I think my style is more Dis then actual Org.  I could really use a secretary - if I could stand the thought of someone else pawing through my stuff on a regular basis. 

On the upside, I found some story ideas I'd forgotten about, a few notes of quirky questions I left myself, and a passel of pages of me yelling at myself.  (I do that.  It's part of the process - especially when I'm stuck.)  The downside is my fat little fingers were itching to play in some of those other ideas when I have work to do.

Additionally, and apropos of something other than the subject of this post, I think I hit on the way to tie Fertile Ground (the next SCIU novel) into Dying Embers better - by making Frank the main male character instead of the dude I already have.  (I thought about changing the heroine, Teri, into Lynn from DE, but I couldn't make it work to suit the story.  Lynn will have to wait.)  It'll take some major rewriting, but I think my readers will enjoy it better if they have a character they already know waiting there for them.

How are you at organization?  Do you leave yourself notes in your own work?    

4 comments:

  1. OK - some points:

    1..I thought the next DE book would be about Frank - you kind of set it up like that, didn't you? And then Lynn - makes perfect sense.

    2. I have books all over the place, too - and equally disorganized. I also have notes in those books to myself to smarten the hell up (are we related?). I have been searching high and low for a manuscript I started (ah, the story of my life) years ago about a big city cop who goes home to help her dad who's had a stroke and try to get her daughter to 'ungoth'...small town...meets up with her high school sweetheart, the bad boy who is now the town vet...and ends up embroiled in a eerie satanic killing spree. I can't find it anywhere???? Driving me nuts!!

    3. Been reading about your mailchimp issues - I use it for work and it took me a long time (big learning curve). I highly recommend you watch their help videos and keep sending stuff to yourself for practice. It really is an awesome program - but I am still learning as I go.

    4. Sorry I've been absent - but I am reading along :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Janet! Hi!

      1) If I did set it up that way, it was subconscious. But then again, my subconscious does a lot of things when I'm not paying attention.

      2) I think we're sisters from another mister. Dang, girl, you never sent me that one. It sounds awesome. You can rebuild it. You have the technology.

      3) I tried reading a tutorial over there but then my eyes started to bleed. I don't have the patience to learn new software type stuff anymore, but I'll get there. I did set up a basic sign-up form - accessible through besanderson.blogspot.com - but right now, I don't have anything to newsletter about.

      4) I know you're there. Because you're awesome like that. :hugs:

      Delete
  2. How am I at organization? Pretty good (so, please don't hate me!). I don't keep books of notes, though. I keep documents on my computer. One is called Book Notes and I put ideas in that one. When I come up with character names for those ideas, then a new document gets named with the character names (i.e. before I had written anything for Ghostly Liaison, I had a document titled "Bridget and Rob" and that's where I put backstory stuff, and family history stuff, and whatever other pertinent stuff I needed.

    So, no sticky notes for me. I think I'd have a mess on my hands if I did. My computer may be organized, but the office is far from it (mainly due to lack of storage space).

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I don't hate you, Stacy. I envy you a little, but not hate. I can't imagine not having notebooks around for when I want to work in the living room or have ideas in the middle of the night when my computer is off. And I do a lot of editing in longhand. Ideas and stuff get transferred to an Ideas file on the computer, though. Eventually.

      LOL, I tried keeping sticky notes on my computer once, but I couldn't see the monitor. Seriously, though, I'm old fashioned that way. And every once in a while, I go through them to toss out what I no longer need or enter it into a file on my computer and then toss it.

      Delete