today i have a question again for you my fellow writers..inspired by our fab alison tyler who spoke about deleting old stuff on her computer i thought about my old stuff..which still dangles along my old laptop..but thats not what i mean...when you write a story...do you take notes? most of us do...i do too..and when you finished the story..re-read it..edited it..send it out..what are you doing then..after it has been published??? i keep the notes..i keep all the edited versions..i keep the final version..i print them out..i burn them on cd...all that crap takes a lot of room to keep them in store? stock? whatever..dont mind my bad english i had my traditional martini-monday along with my fabolous serbian friend renata so i m still a bit drunk as i type this...so..still ..how do you write and how do you storage your work??? ususally you would say its enough to keep the actual book...but what if you wanna sell the story again or send it out again to publish it somewhere else? so..do you all keep notes, books, copies as well as a file or a cd of each story..or is it just silly me?
20 comments:
I keep everything but of course this has not been my problem as nothing has been published.
Burn it all to cd? God, that's organised.
Everything lies around on various computers and bits of paper.
I can't imagine ever being properly organised.
Your comment on Alison's post makes a lot more hilarious sense in the light of your drunken state now. Hee!
but..how do you manage to keep the overview??? i mean..i m suffocation under paperstuff..sigh* and i m really bad when it comesto finde a system or to be..organized...
@ jo
i m sooo not organized..maybe..in a weak moment i ll post you a picter of my working place one day..you ll be shocked..:-)
and..er*...post yes? well..its martini monday..shrugs*...cant help it..:-)
Martini Monday sounds like a great idea to me. Where's that shaker?
It is chaos. I keep everything. Pseudo-organized. Not everything is printed out (I guess I should do that). I back up on a thumb drive all my writing and carry that with me. I also back up stuff through my apple idisk. I just bought a portable hard drive too (it's still in the package). Haven't bothered with CDs yet. I also have files and piles of papers and so many journals it's not even funny. Oh, and scraps of papers too.
yes ms moon..martini monday..its a wonderful tradition i ll keep here at camp santiago:-) as well as martini-mittwoch ( which is wednesday) and dirty-martini-donnerstag (which is tuesday)..i even once drew a illustration for it:
http://desantiagospussyshack.blogspot.com/2009/02/hoch-die-tassen.html
along with one of my fav. drinking-sentences of all time by dorothy parker...
@ robin
gosh..it seems like as you are pretty much like me when it comes to keep your archive..:-)
Hi Danielle - I've missed you! I'm not back in blogland too much yet, but thought I'd stop in and say hi.
I'm not organized at all - and a dangerous amount of my writing just exists on my blog and my laptop. I like living on the edge, I guess!
I love martini Mondays, and your artwork, and the quote by Dorothy Parker!
marina!
i m glad you are back..even if its just "part time"..hope you feel better now:-)
so you are also not organized..it seems like this a writers desease..:-) or will last minute someone of our fellow writers out him or herself as totally neat and organized???
Hi Danielle!
I have writings dating back to the early 80's before I had a PC, and I keep them as well as more current works in notebooks.
Up until last year, I printed my final drafts of everything I wrote. If I do a major rewrite of a story, I'll save a copy of the old version, "just in case."
I keep a simple spreadsheet log of all stories I've submitted and their status.
I'm not gifted at organization, and used to be a complete cluster fuck at keeping records. Maybe it's years of project management experience finally coming to bear, and having a wife who is quite talented with organization, but in recent years, I've found just enough of a system to keep things together.
Cheers!
@ craig
"I keep a simple spreadsheet log of all stories I've submitted and their status"
i so tried to do that too..i simply cant..at one point i get lazy and forget to write down my submissions or i totally loose the paper i wrote it down on..
i mean i got all those tons of cds and papers and notebooks and all as well as files on my laptop, on my old laptop and on a "externe festplatte"...but still..sometimes i search for a certain old story and dont finde even one copy of it!!! which makes me end up tipping it off from the book or magazine it was originally published it..ahhrg!!
Half my old stuff is still on floppy disks. Good grief, I've gotta get that sorted!
floppy what???.....:-)
Great topic, Danielle. And cool to see what others do. I also used to print out a hard copy of my stories, but I'm thinking I don't need to with a computer back-up and all. Still it's hard to let go of that habit. I guess I'm not usually subbing that many stories, but I do keep a log where I just list submissions and then what happened to them and a list of publications for my reference.
@ donna
i just cant let go the habbit of printing my stories out and keep them together with the research notes...
but i really should keep my submission-list straight soi can better track whats going on with my stories..
thank your for stoping and leaving your wonderful coments..:-)
I have tended to keep just about everything — final copy on the computer, backup on hard disk, and many of the copies I printed out during the editing stage (with notes written all over them). One drawer of my file cabinet is devoted just to writing. It is full of notebooks and the aforementioned printed drafts.
Of course I have tended historically to not throw away a lot of things, so this does not seem unique to writing in my life....
@ em
i m like that too..i never throw anything work related away...:-)
Hey Danielle,
I sort of wandered over from Ms moon's blog. I am not a writer, but I do write, and have written a lot and I'm a pack rat... so, I have an idea for you.
Here in the states, we have these things called PODS. They are like little sheds or work spaces that you buy and put on your property. You can stuff it full of filing cabinets with all your papers. I am superstitious about getting rid of paper. I guess I don't fully trust technology or I just need a more tangible link to the past or whatever.
Anyway, good luck!
pf
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