Stay Organized!!

Keep Track and Back Up Your Writing!

Since my house fire back in the 1980s where I lost two novels and about a hundred short stories, I have been great at backing up files, having everything in paper, and out of the house.

And I thought I was being pretty organized, although the organizations systems changed every few years, So here I am now, working on getting all the stories I want to move forward in time into ten story collections. I put the collections together from a spread sheet into genre collections with a title story. Next step after doing the cover, find copies of all the stories.

Well, turns out I was not as organized as I thought I was. One collection I was working on tonight had two stories I just could not find, and I had spent November and December of last year putting all the stories I could find into special folders and making sure they were on the spreadsheet.

I finally found one ine a file labeled “novel starts” and as you might suspect, it was not finished. Not one clue where the other story is at.

So now both stories have vanished from my spread sheet. More than likely on the second one, I changed the title at some point and didn’t get the change reported in the spread sheet.

So if you plan on being prolific, or at least writing steady for the next ten to twenty years, set up a system to not only back up everything in a number of places, but keep the system and the organization over the ten or twenty years. Trust me, you will be really glad you did.