I thought I'd share a few of the things I do to make life easier for me when I write.
First are the pictures I talked about on Tuesday. I have pictures of houses, pictures of rooms inside the homes, pictures of vehicles, and floor plans for the houses. Floor plans are awesome! It keeps me from accidentally moving rooms around the house when I write. There are a lot of sites out there that have them and I have a Pinterest board called House Plans.
Second are character pictures. Technically, this could really go with item one, but this is important enough to give it its own subject. This helps me keep appearance details straight like eye color and hair styles. This is very handy when you can't remember details and it also helps when it comes time to send the publisher cover facts information. I send the pictures of my heroine and hero. Not that I necessarily get characters that look right, but I try.
Third is my calendar. Keeping track of story time is hard for me. Over and over again I would have to print out a hard copy of my work, read through it, and mark at the top of the page what day it was for each scene. It finally occurred to me to print out a calendar and write down the chapter and scene number for the appropriate day. This has saved me incredible amounts of time.
I also save things like PDFs of restaurant menus, seating charts if my characters go out to a public event, and other stuff like this. Maybe what I'm looking at never gets even a remote mention in the actual book, but I like knowing in my own mind what's what.
Keep in mind that I'm a big believer in do whatever works for you and that this might change from book to book.
