On days when it is a winter wonderland, and Manhattan is completely cut off by snow at the end of my street – I hunker down. My apartment isn’t so cold as it was so it’s not as FREAKY hanging out here.
I spent the morning cleaning, throwing shit out – On one of my trips down to the recycle area in the cellar, ran into my next door neighbor who asked me randomly if I wanted a small filing cabinet.
Seeing as all of my writing is now sitting in carefully labeled piles and file-folders in a damn box under my dresser, I jumped at his offer.
I have to get down to some real work this winter/spring – There’s some writing shit to be done. There is no deadline, except the one in my head – but there is also someone waiting for my jottings. And having my 5 drafts of one story sitting in a cardboard box is not good karma. It is not organized. It also is not a good signal, to have one of the most important parts of my life, my writing, tucked away in a box, as though it is summer clothes. No. Time to re-shuffle the room, and bring the work up to the forefront.
And – lo and behold – here comes a free filing cabinet.
I have now filled it up – all different stories in different labeled hanging folders – all correspondence with magazines, editors, agents in one folder, so I can keep track of WHAT THE HELL I AM DOING …
Can I tell you the peace of mind it brings?
I know I’m a simple creature. A filing cabinet fills me with peace.
But so be it. Tis the God’s honest truth.
Meanwhile, the snow keeps coming down.
Now, though, as I look about my room – with all my writing organized and placed in an easy-access kind of way – there’s a space in my brain cleared. And Work can now fill up that space. Before, that space was filled with free-floating anxiety along the lines of, “Okay, now WHICH draft of this story is the latest one? And WHERE did I send out this one? Which magazine is holding onto this piece?” That’s bullshit. It’s no way to write, or to try to succeed.
I’ve got some room now.
I can get going.
Why keep it simple? Pickup a scanner and some OCR software and digitize it all. Anything that is handwritten or can’t pass the OCR muster can be saved as a graphic. Next get a document management application and enter everything into the appropriate electronic filing cabinet and index and cross index the whole lot. Bingo! Your life is no longer simple but you will have instant access to every word or stutter of your written life (although the implementation and maintenance going forward will probably not leave you anytime to write).
Great feeling, ain’t it, Red?
Jim –
HAHAHAHAHA
Yes, you cannot be TOO anal about organization because then it could take up your whole damn life.
and Dean –
oh yeah. It feels damn good!!
And Jim?
i literally have no idea what you are talking about.
i might as well be writing with a fountain pen by candlelight compared to what you describe.
It has improved greatly over what it used to be, but for anyone who’s not a computer geek with plenty of time on his/her hands, using the OCR stuff on a large number of pages might still be too much trouble.
It would be easier just to scan all your pages as images. The only caveat there is that you’ll want to convert the images to jpeg’s and dial the image quality down so that you don’t end up with huge file sizes that would overflow your hard drive. You’ll probably want to set up some sort of filing system, but that can be as simple or as complex as you want it to be.
I was considering creating an MS Access database to catalog every book in the family library.
That wouldn’t be too anal, would it?
anal? do it once, do it right! make sure it has built-in redundancy and is scalable…