Musing on Organization.

This week's topic is "How do you keep your novels, notes, and ideas organized."

I may be a hypocrite when it comes to being organized. I always preach about how important it is to outline and plot and research and save copies of everything. But does that mean my desk and filing cabinet are in perfect order? Er... not exactly.

A third of my notes are in a notebook. Most of those are things I had to jot down in a hurry, or lists I made so I don't forget something, or scribbles of brainstorming, or a few nonsense doodles that came out during a mental block. In other words, no one could read my notebook front to back and make sense of it. Not even me.

An other third of my notes are typed up, printed out, and in a three-ring binder or folder. But even those are messy because I have a ton of them. They sit in a stack, all of them unlabeled so I have to open each one and peek inside to find the one I need. Brilliant, I know.

The final third of my notes are typed up and saved on my computer (with a second copy on my flash drive). These are the most organized of my notes. Every three months or so, I take the time to re-organize my saved documents. I delete stuff I don't need, print out stuff that would be easier to reference on a hard copy, and then re-arrange the rest.

As for my ideas - I assume this means ideas for new projects? Because ideas for current projects are scribbled in my notebook somewhere. Ideas for projects I haven't started on yet stay lodged in my brain.

Keeping novels organized is easy. I sketch and outline for those and save copies of everything on a folder on my computer (and flash drive). I have a folder for each book and short story I've ever worked on so I can always go back to it and pick up where I left off if I need to.

Um, okay, this post ended up much shorter and much more pointless than I anticipated. I don't really have a moral or thought-provoking ending for you. My stuff isn't in neat-freak perfect order, but I know where everything is. Is there a better method out there? Probably. Maybe one of the other Wicked Writers will elaborate on that.

As for me, I'm off to work on Dark Heirloom some more. Have a great Monday. :-)