Disorganization Is Killing Me…

Tonight I Need To Go Through All Stories AGAIN!!!

Now, understand, this is just not the last few years. This disorganization  has built since the late 1980s. (All my stories from earlier were destroyed in a house fire.) Some years I would use a nifty numbering system that seem to make sense at the time. Other years I would use dates and months with no idea why I thought that was a good system.

And not once did I give a thought to the future and the mess I was creating for myself until my creative voice stopped me from writing until I cleaned all this up.

Now I have a simple system that has worked for the last few years and it is logical and makes sense to my mind. And there is a spread sheet that I can sort and figure out where stories were published. And everything will be backed up when I get done with this challenge.

I figured going into this challenge that I would have about fifty ten-story collections, no repeats of any story. But then I started deciding to leave some stories in the past, and found duplicates on stories with different names, and so on and so on.

So now I am down to about 37 collections of stories I want to move forward. There might be more after tonight.

So I will go through all the electronic files, seeing if each story is on my spread sheet and in a collection or not. One more time into the mess of decades of disorganization. And then I will call it good.

Be organized right from the start.

And you know what is even more fun on this. I have seven file cabinets in storage. 16 file drawers, all jammed solid with short fiction, many of which were published, but I have no electronic file in this new system for. Easily 300 stories out there, most of them have no electronic copy.

So over the next few years I will dig back through very old computer hard drives to find stories and try to bring them forward if they are worth it. So eventually my run of collections might total 50 or more books. But just not for this challenge that ends in just over three weeks.

Am I going to make the 75 published books? It is going to be close.