Changes All the Time

I keep trying to find the perfect system to organize my writing, but nothing seems to stick. I've written in WordPerfect, Word, and Scrivener. I've tried organizing my research materials and images in folders, in OneNote, and Pinterest (and others). But no matter what I try, I always end up frustrated with the organizational system.

When I still lived in Minnesota, I started work on what I thought was the first Paladin League story. I sent it to my agent, received some suggestions, and started revising. I didn't finish, though. I needed to start working on other projects including Enemy Embrace and then my job was relocated to Atlanta and I fell into a void that grew deeper when my mom passed away. By the time the fog cleared and I was ready to work on what was now the second Paladin League story, I grew frustrated.

All the notes and research and images I thought I had organized? Could not find most of them. Anywhere.

I thought everything was in Scrivener. It wasn't.

I checked my files, I checked OneNote, I checked Pinterest and I'm still missing things I know I had. Where are they? Your guess is as good as mine at this point.

I'm sure I have handwritten notes and I actually do know where my notebooks are. Yes, notebooks, plural. Because at that time instead of having a dedicated notebook for each book or series, I was mixing everything up and using Post-it flags to color code projects. That was fine when I had one notebook, but with three full and one partial, it's not efficient. I still need to wade into this.

While I'm a big fan of everything digital, there's something about making notes by hand that sparks creativity for me. These pages are notes from revisions from Wicked Obsession.

 

The current system I'm trying is one notebook per series for handwritten notes. All images and research go to OneNote. Write in Word.

We'll see how this goes, but I won't be surprised if this changes, too.