SYSTEM of a Downer

[pendamuse]

If there’s one thing I’m a sucker for, it’s A SYSTEM.

A SYSTEM orga­nizes your writ­ing so you don’t have look in six dif­fer­ent places, both on paper and online, for that one snip­pet of idea you thought was brilliant.

A SYSTEM makes you feel IMPORTANT when you fire it up, sort of like a JARVIS with­out the clever come­backs when I used to think I would get a lot of writ­ing done if I just had a lap­top at home. Portable! Convenient!

I car­ried my first lap­top with me every­where because I was a showy idiot, and it took more than sev­eral months before I real­ized that I would never be so struck by inspi­ra­tion that I would com­pletely stop what I was doing, fire up my lap­top (which in 2006 took for-evah) and pound out sev­eral thou­sand words.

It. Never. Hap­pened.

A SYSTEM makes you feel like a Writer, because you are Writ­ing in a Note­book that has Tabs and Col­ors and a Spe­cial Pen.




I’ve always had a blank book fetish, and for years I actu­ally color coded Mole­sk­ines, and then would obsess about what I would carry around because I could be truck by inspi­ra­tion and com­pletely stop what I was doing, haul out that spe­cific note­book and write until my fin­gers fell off.

That still doesn’t hap­pen, but I cart around a bag with three note­books and six pens every day to work or on trips (it’s actu­ally worse on trips). I wanted to get a few notes down one day last week and then I real­ized I wasn’t car­ry­ing *that* note­book. In fact, I haven’t car­ried *that* note­book for sev­eral months. See - note­books should have their own spe­cific projects (every­one knows this), but when you’re a scat­ter­brain like me, the idea of car­ry­ing around 20 dif­fer­ent note­books makes my knees plead for mercy.




Ever­note, sens­ing my sick­ness, even cre­ated an evil alliance with Mole­sk­ine and there is a note­book that lets me take pic­tures of writ­ten pages to upload to Ever­note as a search­able file. I’ve never used it because I spent about a month obsess­ing what I would actu­ally write in it. I put it some­where safe so I wouldn’t acci­den­tally scrib­ble a gro­cery note on the pages and then feel com­pelled to save to the cloud my need for ground beef, orange juice, and Lac­taid. Now I don’t know where that is.




I’ve gone through lots of SYSTEMS and the only thing that’s con­sis­tent is when I know I’ve writ­ten some­thing I might could use, it’s either in a note­book, on a scrap piece of paper or in a file I can’t access from my cur­rent loca­tion. My SYSTEM is doomed disorganization.




Liq uid Story Binder, Google Docs, SD Cards I’m ter­ri­fied the cats will either eat or pee on, files on inac­ces­si­ble dri­ves - I think some­times I could have so much more writ­ten, if only I could keep track of my stuff. Not really, though. I’m just dis­or­ga­nized and eas­ily dis­tracted and I smell Spaghet­tios. I can write, and I can save, and I can even keep a mea­ger bread­crumb train of every­thing I’m work­ing on in Drop­Box, but it’s not pretty, and it’s not my idea of orga­ni­za­tion, and it makes me walk away from the words for months on end.

I hate that.

Today’s new SYSTEM is Scrivener. It is not a brand new sys­tem to me, I was aware of it before, but pre­vi­ously it was only avail­able for Mac. TI saw a sale last week and despite my hate for all things pre­vi­ously Mac/Apple Only, because the updates for PC/Android come months down the line, I decided it was time to revamp the SYSTEM.  It was well beyond ttime to to stop (and I mean it this time) mop­ing over last year’s fails and mis-steps and move for­ward like it’s 2010 all over again and I was pretty much unstop­pable. I was tired of glanc­ing at fold­ers and files and being utterly lost in my own head and unable to just pickup and move for­ward. I was really tired of miss­ing words.




I’ve had Scrivener about a week, and like I’ve said about the last six sys­tems I’ve tried and walked away from, I think this one is actu­ally going to stick. I like the Inter­face, the orga­ni­za­tion and the At A Glance cork­board - some­thing LSB (at l east the ver­sion I have) didn’t have. I had taken to tak­ing writ­ten Chap­ter Names and mini-synopses on the wall above my desk to keep track of some kind of out­line, and then I put up art I thought I was going to spend a few days mov­ing files over, refor­mat­ting (I hate that part), and fid­dling around with stuff that would actu­ally keep me from writ­ing. It took a few hours. It’s a SYSTEM that isn’t dis­tract­ing with its bells and whis­tles, and I’m a lit­tle lost right now. I don’t know if I want to throw it a party or take it to the alley and beat it to death.

Grab­bing Scrivener felt like nest­ing, the kind I do right before I crank out 25,000 words and a bunch of sto­ries, some­thing I really haven’t done in a few years and I miss so much. The new exter­nal SYSTEM may be some­thing I need to reor­ga­nize the inter­nal SYSTEM that’s felt lost and in dis­ar­ray for years. I seem to be putting a lot of hops into a pro­gram that could just as eas­ily crap its brains and take sev­eral days worth of work with it, but that’s how I roll. Here are my sparkly break­ables and I’ll just put them on this wob­bly shelf held up with fish­ing line and scotch tape.

I have to ask because when I strug­gle to reor­ga­nize, I like the shiny dis­trac­tion and the learn­ing curve, but how do other peo­ple keep projects, and how many SYSTEMS have been blown through before the right one came along?