The Great Adventure

I’ve had many people tell me I am good at multitasking. I’m also pretty versatile. Both have come from a lifetime of (1) doing other jobs to pay bills while I feed my addiction for writing; and (2) juggling writing time with other responsibilities. I sincerely planned on doing nothing else this summer but work on writing and the necessary editing and marketing that comes with it. But my wife told me in no uncertain terms that she could find several indoor projects for me to do around the house when it gets too hot out to work outside. And I have to admit, based on past experience, that a life of doing nothing but writing would drive me slowly insane.

And so while I am taking care of business at my office, writing this and that, keeping in touch with my fellow bloggers, and fixing plumbing, etc. at home, I will need to keep a level of organization in my life. That’s taken many forms over the years. Used to be I kept manila folders with writing projects in them. Then it graduated to floppy disks. Now it’s flash drives. I have three flash drives that I am depending on to keep me organized.

I learned during my tenure as a doctoral student to always back up your work in multiple locations. Even now, eight years after receiving my PhD, I still have copies of my dissertation in its many stages, along with hundreds of pages of notes. And that material is in hard copy form, on my desktop computer at home, and at my office on the school’s mainframe somewhere. Why? Being a doctoral students makes you incredibly paranoid about losing anything, especially a dissertation that you have been working on for years.

Staying organized is a relentless task for me, one that I feel good about sometimes, and other times feel I am losing the war. Right now, I am working on the first book in my new Christian suspense series, The Champion. I did a read-through of the latest version of the book on PDF form. Now that it is time to transfer corrections to the Word version, it is nowhere to be seen. I know that it exists somewhere; otherwise, why would I have a PDF version? Nevertheless, I may be forced to find an older version of the manuscript if I can’t find the latest one.

Having multiple versions of a manuscript–and multiple copies of each version–is an issue that I deal with a lot. It’s a symptom of my paranoia, I guess, and I imagine it’s better than having no copy at all. And I don’t think I want to consider deleting old versions when the new one is saved. It’s something I am looking for a solution for. Maybe one of you has an idea?

And the search goes on. Wish me luck.