Well, I’ve gone through three rooms of our house looking for notebooks and folders containing notes for my books, and so far I’ve come up with twelve notebooks and six folders all containing notes, passages and diagrams for the novels. There are an additional three notebooks which contain the actual novels themselves (two for Book One and one so far for Book Two). Though I have hundreds of pages of notes, drawings, and excerpts, I don’t think I’m done finding everything for the books. It’s a scary idea, to say the least.

I’m trying to get organized. One of the biggest problems with the books is that inspiration has struck at odd times and I wrote down what I could in whatever notebook I had at the time. These then got mixed in with notes, classwork and the thesis which were all put up in different places. In the back of my mind, I can always tell when I have already written down an idea or a passage, but it’s another matter to find the actual sheet of paper where I wrote it down. This has been a big problem since I started work on Book Two, because timelines, details and excerpts exist which I want to include but can’t if I can’t find them. I’m obsessed with trying to be as consistent as possible. One of my pet peeves about much fiction I’ve read is the inconsistent information that arises over a series such as hair color changing at random or size becoming unclear or even just when prior events occurred. I want to be as consistent as possible, and in order to do so, I need my notes!

I’ve asked Ian if there’s any way he can come up with a database for me, something I can use to more easily access my information. Originally–all of my notes being handwritten and mixed all together–all of my notes were typed up on the computer in one document. That document grew and grew until it was almost a hundred pages long, and it was far too bulky to search easily. It contained general information about the novels as well as information for each individual book, and for a nine book series, that’s a lot. So I broke it up by book into 10 different documents–nine for the novels and one for general information–but it’s still not cut up enough. Every time I want to find all my information on a character, that means having ten documents open in order to access it all. It’s sometimes hard to remember if I put one piece of information in “general” or with a particular book. Because I so frequently come across new notes in random notebooks, it takes a while to figure out if it has already been typed up once before, and so I end up with redundant entries. I really need a database with categories and labels, and I’m hoping that we can come up with something to suit my needs because ten documents ranging from ten to fifty pages each is too much to sift through.

But I am excited to have found so much of my book’s information because that’s a good first step to organizing it–having it in one place, at least. I’ve condensed it down to two notebooks and the folders, and I might be able to clear up some more of that once I label the folders and decide what should go where. I feel like a paper pusher.