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.
One Comment
Mary
I started a comment and somehow either deleted it or sent it. So if I’m repeating myself, apologies.
Your story of woe about losing track of a story because you changed the title, illustrates my point about assigning a unique number to each story when started. This is how relational databases work. Every file has a unique number. If you’re using a spreadsheet, you can assign the number and a title in a separate column. The title can change, or you can add another column to keep track of all the titles (recommended).
The easiest and least cumbersome way to assign numbers is to start with the calendar year and assign a number starting with 1. Because you may write as many as 100 stories and won’t make it to 1000 in a single year, and you want to have the numbering system work to sort from the first to the last story of the year, the first story will be assigned year-001. Thus the first story of 2026 would be 2026.001. The last story could be 2026.999. The first story in 2027 would become 2027.001.
You would use all the other columns to keep track of title, pennames, length, genre, etc. You could add a column for novel starts or any other thing you need to keep track of. Just set up a column and put an X in the cell if an unfinished story becomes a novel start.
The spreadsheet would be your tracking system. You would file your stories both with electronic files and in paper by number rather than title. You can sort your spreadsheet by story title or search it by title to find the file number.
When sending a completed story to a magazine or anthology, you can change that file name to whatever you want and note it in a separate spreadsheet column, along with the publishing or submission info.
You do have to be anal about keeping up your spreadsheet so you don’t repeat numbers, but it’s so worth it when looking for a story you wrote years or even months ago.
For those addicted to paper, set up a spreadsheet, print it out and make your entries in pen or pencil. When you have admin time, enter the info in the spreadsheet and reprint the spreadsheet for making pen entries going forward. You will know what you have to enter because everything already entered will be printed out. Any pen entries need to be added to the spreadsheet.
Don’t know if it would be worth going back 50 years to rename electronic or paper files, but it sure would work going forward.
Excel hint: When printing out, make sure you have selected All Borders for the entire spreadsheet so the lines will print.