Staying Organized

I'm not an organized person by nature.  I mean, I know where everything is for the most part and I can usually keep track of appointments in my head.  (Sketchy business, I know, but it used to work for me.)  But the more things I have to do, the less I'm able to juggle it using just my brain cells. 

When I started this self-publishing thing, I knew I would need help.  I picked up a date book.  And a wall calendar with just dates and no pictures.  Stuff gets jotted one place or the other or both, so I don't drop the ball on the things that need doing.  (In theory.  I still drop the ball from time to time anyway.)

That was last year at this time.  And one would've assumed I would be smart enough to know in advance that I would need all that stuff again.  But no.  It's December 15th and I only just now got a 2016 date book.  I still need a calendar I can write stuff on.  I guess I should've written 'buy new organizational materials' in my 2015 book so I wouldn't forget.

:shrug:

Being a self-published author means keeping track.  It has to.  I don't have a boss, giving me deadlines.  I don't have a secretary to remind me I have something due to the editor.  There's no team putting together my marketing plan and no assistant following up on things for me.  It's just me.  And my planner.

Me... and my planner... strolling down the avenue...

Ahem.

It's green.  I like green.  This year's is smaller because the dollar store didn't have bigger ones and I didn't want to drive to Walmart.  (Which is why I didn't get a calendar.  The dollar store didn't have anything but the pretty picture calendars.)  As long as it keeps me on track, I don't care how big it is.  When I was outside sales, I had a huge date book.  But I had a lot of appointments and notes and junk.  "10:30am - Ann Arbor - Mary Jones at Widgets, Inc. to discuss engineering of new Platt case."  Stuff like that.

Now?  No time stamp. No location.  "Edits to JC" "Contact AB about ad" "Make shot appt" Check it off when it's done. 

I just have to remember to write it in the book.  And sometimes that's the trick.  Remembering to write stuff down so I'll remember it. 

How do you stay organized?

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?