I make notes. All the time. Anywhere. This is why I travel with a steno pad in my tote bag. I used to make notes on random pieces of paper, but it became too hard to find anything and I felt disorganized. The steno pad lets me keep all my notes in one place.
It's not perfect. One day I might be making notes on idea three and the next day on idea two and the day after that on idea four, and this means that my information is all mixed up. If you paged through the pad I have with me today, you'd jump between six different ideas--several times. Today, in a fit of genius, I used Post-it flags to mark where the notes are for each story. A different color for each series/book. I'd been using a couple of flags to mark the Work In Progress (WIP) notes, but I couldn't find anything else without a lot of flipping. Now I can.
If this makes me sound organized, it's an illusion. I'm trying to keep all my notes in one place, but it just doesn't work for a variety of reasons. The first is that I want my notes to be electronic, but because of portability and ease of use issues, I do make notes on paper. All the time. Besides, there's something about writing by hand that seems to jumpstart my brain the way typing on computer doesn't. Which is weird because when I'm actually writing story, I have to type.
So now I have handwritten notes and electronic notes. If I could put everything in one program--which I was attempting to do before I bought a new laptop--I'd still call it good. But Office 2007 came with OneNote and I wanted to try it because I heard so many good things. I love OneNote. I also love Liquid Story Binder. LSB does stuff that OneNote doesn't and vice versa. Then there's the pictures folder and the email folder for each book.
Anyway, the bottom line is I'm just as disorganized as ever and notes are in far too many places despite my efforts at consolidation. That's why a little thing like using colored Post-it flags to make the notes for each story easy to find excites me. Anything that makes things easier for me excites me.
PS: Joyce, you won the contest on Riley's Reviews. Please visit her blog for deets.
