Ouch. I’m not sure we have enough goat wrap in the house to cover both my arms, but it’s probably worth the attempt to find it all. My elbows are threatening to cease connecting my forearms to my upper arms. My forearms feel like the muscles are attempting to extricate themselves from both skin and bone. My wrists are amazingly still functioning albeit with a degree of pain should I shift them from any position than straight. My hands appear to have invisible blades running between the bones, and several of my fingers think that straightening out is too much effort. My left shoulder, as usual, has given up completely and has gone from sharp stabbing pains to a fuzzy numbness, leaving the area around it to pick up the pace on keeping up with sending pain signals to my brain. Why all this agony? Well, I’ve been writing. A lot.

When I picked my novels up again recently, I decided I needed to devote a lot of time to typing up content from Book 1 as well as my piles of notes while periodically handwriting more content to Book 2 in its notebook. In that time, I’ve typed up a couple chapters of Book 1, I’ve typed up the prologue and first chapter to Book 2 in addition to adding twelve handwritten pages of new content. I’ve typed up I don’t know how many pages of notes–probably somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty or more–and still have several folders/notebooks full of notes to add to the mess. I’ve redrawn the blueprints to the inn where the brunt of Book 2 takes place (still need to scan those in) twice in the past week and have more maps yet to draw. I also sat down and wrote out the outline and more notes for Book 3, the one I’m planning on using for NaNoWriMo, then I typed those up as well. I’m getting pretty used to the sound of my keyboard acting as additional percussion to the music I listen to as I type.

Today’s typing projects took on a more clerical role than that of simply copying material from one medium to another. This evening, I decided I needed to go through all the notes that have already been typed up on the computer and organize them. The evolution of my typed notes has quite a history, actually. Since I began work on my novels in France where I had limited access to computers, I instead handwrote absolutely everything including all my notes. I wrote lots of notes while in France because I wanted the gist of the novels cleared up at the beginning so I couldn’t lose sight of the end. When I got back to the States, I eventualy typed up all those notes in the order in which I’d written them as one big long document. The notes covered various aspects of nine different novels, so there would be something about character development for someone in Book 4 followed immediately by a short scene from Book 2 which preceded a quick blurb about the plot of Book 8. Messy? Hells yes. These notes consisted of about thirty sheets of notebook paper covered front to back with my tiny scribbling. As my notes on the computer grew longer, I decided that keeping all the notes for all the novels in one place was rather stupid because I sure wasn’t going to put all the books in one document! So some time ago, I copied and pasted my way through that long document and created ten separate documents to cover all the novels as well as a generic file for miscellaneous ideas and information.

The ten files were great, but over time, I would periodically create other files for extra long excerpts or for quick notes that I had typed elsewhere and hadn’t gotten around to merging with the existing texts. Tonight’s task was to combine all those documents into the appropriate note files. I didn’t stop there though. Nope. The notes for each book were in just as indiscernible order as they had been when in the larger document. Notes about themes were mixed in with plot points which were totally out of order chronologically speaking. My solution was to come up with basic categories in which I could group notes within each document consistently across the board. Time consuming? Yup. Some of the files had just a few pages–between two and five–but a couple had upwards of around twenty-five pages of notes that needed parsed out. One book–Book 5–actually had two documents for notes: one with generic notes and one with excerpts already written. The notes? Four pages. The excerpts? Twenty-nine. Let’s just say that Ctrl+x and Ctrl+v are dear friends.

So here I am at nearly four in the morning, making typos like mad because of the late hour, but my brain is awhirl in a different world–that of my novels–and I can’t get it to shut off. I doubt the cup of coffee after dinner did much good, but that was around nine. Regardless. I have a small stack of papers (about five pages) that I’d like to finish typing up before attempting to go lie down and make a vague attempt at unconsciousness. The cat will just wake me up around seven regardless, so why not stay up until then? (Because it won’t take me that long to type this up, that’s why.) My arms will likely destroy themselves before that hour rolls around anyway. I think they’ve set themselves on self-destruct. That’s why I need more goat wrap. Gotta hold them together a little longer. Tomorrow (er, today) is going to be interesting.