How Do You Organize?

I’m looking for a good way to organize all the fiction that I write/have written. Right now I just have a directory and everything gets stored haphazardly in subdirectories there.

I guess I could use a plain old spreadsheet, but that isn’t really as extensible as I want. I’ve got one submission tracker that I haven’t really tried yet, but again, I don’t think it tracks everything that I want.

Here’s what I want it to track.

• Story Title
• Short Description
• Location (Where I saved the little beast)
• Complete/In Progress
• Length
• Notes about story (i.e. submit it to Asimov’s & The New Yorker when finished)
• Date/place of publication (with a link if possible)
• List of places/times it’s been submitted

Any ideas?

Comments (4 Responses)

May 18th, 2010 DarcsFalcon

Well, I’m not entirely sure I know what you’re looking for, but what about this? http://softwarebybrian.com/cms/content/view/20/2/ It’s basically for writing stories, but it’s like using index cards, and you can sort them however you want. Don’t know if you can use links, but I’m sure you could paste in the URL at least.

May 18th, 2010 Bryce Beattie

Well, I probably do need something to make organization of info for a story, but right now I’m looking for something more akin to iTunes, except it would link to stories rather than mp3s.

May 18th, 2010 DarcKnyt

Y’know, I don’t organize. Like you I keep everything in folders, forget where they went, have to search, can’t remember titles or any such crap, and then I’m all discombobulated.

Now, I’m sure you’re going to arrive at this yourself, but … being a crack bit wrangler, I’d bet you can write something up yourself.

Also, try checking with Simon Hayes’s Spacejock Software. I know he has something like this for tracking queries; maybe it will do more. His software for writers is generally over the top.

Then again, since you’re an OpenOffice boy, why not put this all in a database? You can customize it as much or little as you’d like. And a spreadsheet is the fastest way there, period.

But this sounds like a job for a database or a programmer … a database programmer. That’s just me though.

May 20th, 2010 Bryce Beattie

Yeah, I may be a programmer, but I’m also lazy…

In playing with Simon Haynes’s Sonar, I think It’ll do pretty much everything I want it to do.

Leave a Reply

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website

... by Bryce Beattie