Yet another copybook.
Or, to be more precise, another ring binder.
Fact is, while my country sinks into terminal economic crisis and my CVs disappear in the black hole in which the CVs of the overeducated and underemployed end their life, I’m fulfilling my old dream of writing for a living.
Or die trying.
This means, among other things, keeping an eye out for open calls in the genres I normally write.
Which in turns means be organized, and write fast.
I already covered the write fast side of things in previous post, so I’ll talk about organization (or lack thereof) here.
In the first half of 2014 I missed a lot of opportunities because I lost track of open calls and deadlines.
This is bad.
So here’s how I’m working now.
I’ve got a small ring binder, the size of a normal copybook.
And I’ve got a pack of blank, perforate sheets.
Whenever a call comes up that looks promising, I prepare a page writing down
- magazine/publisher
- theme/guidelines
- payment
- contact informations
- deadline
The single pages can be ordered by deadline expiration.
If the call is for pitches and not for finished stories, I also note the date in which I sent my pitch and the name of the person I sent my pitch to (so that I can track my outgoing email in Gmail).
On the back of the page I will be able to write feedback and follow up informations
- title of the finished story
- word count etc
- date sent
- date I receved a reply (hopefully…)
- editorial notes/rewrites required
- Sale/NO Sale
- If Sale –> $ paid
- payment received on…
- notes etc.
I can put a separator in the binder, with open jobs and finished/dead jobs, and I can archive my sheets by year.
This allows me to build a nice, low tech archive of my works, with notes about different outlets for my writing, and contact informations of editors and publishers.
As a crutch for my derelict memory, I use a desktop app called Rainlendar, set to sound an alarm ten days before a deadline expires, and again three days before deadline expiration.
The whole thing I do with the ring binder+app combo could be probably handled using a web application like Google Calendar or Zoho.
And certainly I could use a database/spreadsheet application to do the same.
But I prefer the low-tech approach.
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