I am not an organized person. I love making schedules, but they are normally written on scrap pieces of paper I then cannot find. I find recipes, then write them on the backs of receipts.
For the most part, there has been no rhyme or method to my writing…until it came time to revise. I found myself procrastinating and dawdling all over the place (and I always thought myself so disciplined!) and I realized I needed to do something to force my own hand.
So I made an excel spreadsheet and started a wordcount on it (wordcount, not pages, because that’s how heavy the revision was…pretty much rewriting over half the book). Then as I drew closer to finishing revisions, I made an agent/query page on my excel spreadsheet. It lists agents, dates queried, or date planned to query, response time (or if they are non-responders), notes drawn from agent interviews about whether or not they like book comparisons or personal chit-chat, and what authors they like.
Currently it also lists a contest I am entering, and all the pertinent dates.
This may seem perfectly reasonable to most people, but for me this is hilarious. This is a thousand miles outside of my nature and wheelhouse and whatever else. And you know what the real reason for all this sudden organization is? It is something tedious, but purposeful and writing-related that I can do when I am…well, procrastinating vis-a-vis the actual writing. It makes me feel like I didn’t waste all my time when I spent half an hour looking up querytracker stats, rather than refining dialogue, or re-re-revising that last chapter, which definitely needs it.
Organization, for me, is not the product of an organized mind, but of one desperately seeking easy distraction that is still vaguely related to what I really need to be doing.
Mind you, that’s what this blog post is too…so I’d better go!
J. L. Odom 