Summer is not over. I refuse to believe it. We’ve got another month before fall officially shows up in the Northern Hemisphere, and even longer in some places before it really arrives.

That said, I’m trying to get organized, so I’m ready when the season does finally turn. This endeavor is writing-related and also living-related; I moved into this house a little over a year ago, and there are still boxes that… well, they probably don’t need to be unpacked- it’s enough to know that that plastic tote in the garage contains electrical cords; they don’t need to be hung on the wall- but I should make sure that box contains what I think it does. And if there’s an item that’s no longer useful to me, it can find a new home. Or if there’s two boxes of a thing, because moving four times in eight years is a complex business and sometimes things get packed weirdly, I can consolidate boxes.

So I’m taking inventory, getting ready for the literal and probably metaphorical change of seasons- we should play a game; what state do y’all think I’m moving to next?- I’d love to know, because I don’t, yet- and it occurred to me that I should also take inventory of my writing. A much less physically demanding task, and a useful one.

I’ve been writing for about twelve years, and passed the ten-year mark on publishing last spring. I’ve got a lot of fiction floating around on my computer. Some of it’s pretty well organized; some of it’s not. My log of MGC posts is in pretty good shape; I’ve always saved them by title and date, and if the title is something esoteric, sometimes I’ll put a few descriptive words in, as an aide memoire. I could separate them out by year if I wanted to make finding a specific post slightly easier. I do 24-25 posts here per year, and I think I’ve been doing them for six or seven years, so that’s a lot of headings to scroll through. All in all, it’s reasonably well-kept, and there’s an automatic online backup on the blog itself.

The fiction is somewhat less organized. I try, but things slip through the cracks and end up saved in weird places, or under names that don’t mean anything to me after some time’s gone by. Then I have to open the file to figure out what’s in it, and I get lost in reading my own stuff and comparing it to what I have now, and the next thing I know, two hours have gone by and I’ve gotten nothing done. I also do this when I’m inventorying books other people wrote, and have since I was a kid, so it’s not a surprise.

Fortunately for me, this kind of inventory can be done in pieces. I can organize a folder, then do another task, then maybe organize another folder. Rinse and repeat until the job’s done or I get bored. Remembering to update my backups before I walk away is the next hurdle I have to clear; sometimes it gets done.

I’m relaying all this to you, ladies, gents, and small flightless birds, because I think it’s one of those writerly tasks that gets overlooked, even though it’s important. You want to be able to find your past works, if only so you can prove you wrote it, when some jerk grumps at you for being an LLM; or you need to prove ownership. The right way to do it is, when you finish each project, go through your word processor, gather up all the detritus associated with that project, label everything so that future-you will understand what’s in the file- bonus points if the label is something that doesn’t require a lot of context- and save it all in one place. Then make a backup. Then consider making another backup.

(And by, making sure the label doesn’t require context to understand, I mean, if I save all these posts in a folder called ‘blog posts’ that’s fine until I start writing for another blog and have to save those posts somewhere. So I’m saving these ones under a title that’s specific to this blog. Similarly, in a multi-part series, it’s best to save each piece according to where it lies in the series, maybe a book or chapter title, instead of lumping everything together under the series name and hoping you remember what order each chapter goes in.)

If you’re like me, and you haven’t been so careful, or your style of saving things has changed over the past decade, it’s a bigger task, and definitely one to be done in segments or stages. But the process itself is approximately the same.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going out to the garage to find out what else got packed in with the electrical cords during my last move. How’s your day going?