so friggin' excited

You know that feeling when you've been trying and trying to get a major project out of the way, and only time and your procrastinating brain have prevented you from doing so? But you've finally bitten the bullet, taken the bull by the horns, cut the Gordian knot and (before the metaphors get completely out of hand) completed the project in one fell swoop?

Yeah, I've got that feeling.

I've finished collating my notes.

Whaddya mean, "what notes"? The notes on my novel, muttonhead! The umpteen kilobytes of Word documents and Notepad files that were laying around on my computer, unlabeled, unsorted and unorganized!

Yeah, them.

This was the first step to creating a comprehensive enchiridion (my new favorite word) for my novel series. You heard me: not just my first novel, the entire series. I'm planning the whole thing out, beginning to end—a full-blown outline. I bought a blank notebook at Homeplus, devoid even of guidelines. It's just waiting invitingly for me to fill it with scribbles, diagrams, maps, plot-lines, threads, trains of thought, brainstorming, character sketches, fictive interviews, story-planning matrices, bits of dialogue, assorted footnotes and other miscellany.

Before that, however, I had to get my house in order.

I have typed roughly 100,000+ words—30,000 more than the manuscript itself—in notes for this first book and almost every book after. (In case you were wondering, I have no idea how many books will be in this series; but with the amount of material I've got, I'm thinking somewhere in the neighborhood of 15-20. It all depends on whether I'm a good enough writer to tease enough material out of the miasma of inchoate notions in my brain without going stale.)

Most of that material is—or was, until today—bound up in a little Windows program called Notepad. Notepad lets you type notes to yourself and save them in a simple format. I had collected, by my count, 227 of these "notes-to-self," ranging in length from a few sentences to 1,000 words. (I also have a 40,000-word document on Microsoft Word, and piles of scattered paper notes in boxes back home in California; but we won't mention them here.)

How do I know that there were exactly 227 files, you ask? Well, that's because I numbered them.

I thoughtfully labeled these notes with the letter "z" and a corresponding number in ascending order. I have no idea why. Ostensibly, I wanted them to be easy to find and refer to. The "z" prefix ensured that the novel notes would always be the last in any list (I have quite a few other notes on various topics, not all of them writing-related). That way I could find them quickly and open them.

That would have been okay, as long as I'd had less than 10 note files. But when I found myself typing "z-227" and hitting the "Save" button, I thought Something's gotta be done about this.

I love my Friday class schedule. I have only four classes, with breaks in between them all. This means three hours of classes and three hours of free time, every Friday. The amount of writing/organizing I get done on Fridays is freakin' ridiculous.

And, on this particular Friday...I finished the Great Work. I'm done collating my digital notes. I went through each and every one of the little bastards, examined their content (most of which I'd forgotten that I'd ever written), analyzed them carefully, relabeled or relocated them as necessary, then deleted the originals. There isn't anything in my files beginning with "z" anywhere. They've all been aggregated into large topic-specific files, or renamed and alphabetized.

There remains but for me to go home, get out a freshly sharpened No. 2 pencil, lick the tip (if I'm feeling flippant), open my empty notebook, click on the Notepad file named "regions and story arcs," and start mapping out my complete series.

So friggin' excited...