Getting Organized: A Lesson in Keeping Track

Image by Hatice EROL from Pixabay

I recently made a mistake that at the beginning of my           writing life would have made me cringe and want to   crawl under the desk, but by this time I just kicked myself once and set about making sure it didn’t happen again. What was the error? I lost track of the final version of a short story, and submitted an earlier draft to a publication that has published everything I’ve sent it so far. It was rejected, of course.

 

My decision last year to increase the number of short stories I wrote and submitted meant more work floating around on my desk top and in my files, so I needed a better tracking system. I could no longer rely on the lists on paper I kept in a three-ring binder. I set up my spreadsheet and listed title, magazine/publisher, date submitted, date responded, response, notes. Sometimes a story is accepted by the first editor who reads it, and some titles end up going to a number of magazines before finding a home. The spreadsheet gave me a clear overview of where my work was. Apparently I was not as tidy with the stories themselves, and that’s where the trouble came in.

 

After the story was rejected I went looking for the final version I thought I had submitted. I easily found what I had submitted—it was right where it was supposed to be. But it did not read like the final version, which I remembered clearly because of the research it involved for a very neat ending (at least I thought it was near). I found and reviewed the research, but no matter how many times I searched, the only version that came up was the early rejected draft—in several places.

 

Several writers I know talk about pulling out work from years earlier and reworking the material into something new. To me the old stuff is just clutter but it still sits on my computer. After the mix-up with the story in question I’ve decided to clean out the old stuff and keep only the one version of material I’m working on. The danger of once again losing the one version that matters amid all the clutter and finding only the rejects is enough to decide me.

 

When the personal computer first became available and many writers were skeptical (many of us were still in love with our typewriters), The Writer carried an article about a novelist who argued in favor of the advantages of the new technology. He talked about how easy it was for him to compose two versions of the same scene. I remember vividly the photograph of him sitting at his desk holding up one version in his left hand and another in his right while he considered which was best for his work. That image haunted me because to me it meant he had two different novels, not two choices within one novel.

 

I may be a party of one in this matter, but I know that I rarely return to an earlier version. And in fact I can’t think of one instance in which I did, and then chose it over the more recent one. By now (a few weeks after the fact) I’m mostly philosophical about the incident. With the increase in my productivity in the last year it was probably inevitable that I would make such a mistake. I just wish it hadn’t been this one. And it won’t happen again.