On Organization and Ivy

by Janis Patterson

How on earth did it get to be the 15th of December of 2021? In contrast to last year, which seemed to go on for aeons with no end in sight, this year has whizzed past like a hummingbird who spots a newly filled feeder - and not nearly as prettily!

Don’t worry - I’m not going to wax sarcastic or angry about politics (at least not here) - I’m just saying that time didn’t go as quickly when I was younger. In my defense, as a full-time writer I tend to live my life in a cocoon - The Husband says I live only half-way in the world of reality - and that makes time slip away even more easily.

All my writing life I have been sort of a do-it-now and bounce-from-one-project-to-another kind of person. Great fun, but not very businesslike. Disorganization is not efficient, but although I could set up really nifty organizational systems (something I used to do for all different kinds of businesses) but after setting up one for myself (one of many over the years) would never keep up with it once it was done. Sigh.

You might know that I have been a very happy member of Novelists, Inc. (NINC) for years, and have learned so much from it. However - this last conference I attended a workshop that literally changed my life. I don’t remember the speaker - a very nice woman writer who is apparently quite successful - but she spoke on organization and one of her centerpieces was a planning board. Apparently these organizational boards have been around for a number of years in all kinds of industries, but I confess I had never heard of such a thing.

It’s a fairly big whiteboard, divided into 9 boxes of equal size. The three vertical columns are for the months - her version of the board was set up to cover a quarter, which makes sense to me. The horizontal columns are (going down) To Do, Doing, Done. How incredibly simple!

After NINC I bought a piece of whiteboard and some thin, pretty lining tape. After a lengthy session with a tape measure (you do know that I am numerically-challenged, don’t you?) I divided the board into 9 roughly equal oblongs. As the quarter had already started, I slapped a bunch of stuff up, thinking that was all that was needed.

It was not. Oh, the board was nice-enough looking, if somewhat amateurish. There are very pretty boards, all color coordinated and perfect-looking available on line, but - hey! - I’m a writer, and therefore poor. I did spring for some colored post-its and markers, which made the board look sprightly. Blue for the first month, pink for the second, green for the third, all with matching felt tip pens. Very impressive.

But I am learning that there is more to organization than just slapping down some things I want to have done, which is very different from actually doing. Now that there is a fresh quarter to say nothing of a fresh year staring me in the face, I’m giving more thought to what I want to put on my board. Not what I want done, but what I should do. And what I can do.

I find myself breaking down each task into component parts. Instead of just ‘publish My New Book’ I find it much more helpful to have a post-it for doing final edit, one for getting copyright, one for setting up ISBN, one for cover, one for uploading, one for deciding on pre-order and release dates... all the necessary minutiae for a release. So much easier than trying to remember everything at once - you can’t afford to miss a single step, and yet private life is a beast which sometimes seems determined to upset everything.

As I begin each step I move it into the Doing box. When the task is completed, the post-it is moved into the Done box. Maybe it’s a small thing, somehow related to the pretty stickers given out by kindergarten teachers as a reward for each task accomplished, but it gives me a little lift to see the Done box filled up with completed post-its.

Nor do I wait until the night before to work out my quarterly board. Remember I said I was a do-it-now and bounce-around type person? I find that in trying to fill out my board with the next quarter’s tasks I find I have been making notes (albeit general ones, to be fleshed out when I actually write up the post-its) in a dedicated notebook. Apparently organization is like ivy - once it gets a foothold it spreads everywhere! I have even been found recently cleaning out the kitchen cabinets!

Now I fully admit that this last quarter’s board was an intense learning curve, punctuated with several Family Situations that had to be attended to. Life happens. The board helped to keep me on track, as winding and overblown as it was. I expect better from next quarter’s.

It’s true - you are never too old to learn something, and when you learn something that actually works it’s wonderful. I greatly anticipate what this next quarter’s board will do for me.

PS - this is my last blog of the year. I want to thank you for your support this past year and look forward to seeing you all next year. I wish all of you the Happiest of New Years!

Oh, Those Pesky Ideas!

by Janis Patterson

I am a pretty organized kind of person – where work is concerned, that is. We won’t talk about my housekeeping. With my books, however, I am very orderly. I try to write a fair number of words every day – though I don’t always make it every single day. (Life just gets in the way sometimes!) I keep to a schedule and respect deadlines. I have my books blocked out for the next eighteen months – a gothic romance, the first book of my new Rachel Petrie archaeological mysteries, a sweet older-heroine romance… It’s a nice, orderly system.

Except when it isn’t. Unfortunately, creativity has no respect for schedules and orderly systems.

I’ll explain. Last month The Husband and I took a trip to Las Vegas. We had won it some time ago and it had come down to use it or lose it, so of course we used it. We were put up in the Plaza, an older but nicely refurbished hotel/casino at the end of the Fremont Experience. That’s sort of an outdoor mall – it used to be one of the main downtown streets, but they closed it off, put an enormous canopy over it (way over it – 6 or 8 stories!) to keep the worst of that vicious Las Vegas sun off. I personally prefer the funky downtown Fremont Experience to the Strip.

When we left I had just finished the final edits on the new Flora Melkiot mystery – Murder in Death’s Waiting Room – and I had thought she was ready to be retired for a while. After all, I was already doing prep work on my new gothic and even had a couple of chapters written, then had started doing some early prep work on the first book about contract archaeologist Rachel Petrie. I also have two books ready to self-publish, and that takes a lot of work.

Except once in Vegas ideas began pelting me like summer hail in Texas – big and fast. Starchy, proper, elderly Flora and Las Vegas seemed made for each other. The entire story – motive, method, murderer, MacGuffins, clues (sorry – I couldn’t think of a word for clues beginning with ‘m’) – spooled through my head with terrifying cohesiveness. During our wandering around I wore a purse only big enough to hold my credit card, a hanky or two and my phone.

You know, that could be a writer’s vision of Hell – a great idea and no pencil or paper. However, I have adapted well to modern times, so while The Husband fiddled with the slots, I would sit and email ideas to myself on my phone.

It’s still a great idea, and I’ll probably write it just as soon as I finish this current, half-written gothic which has a hard deadline. And it works out well too, as my primary advisor for the Rachel Petrie series has to defend her PhD thesis this summer, so we’ve agreed to start over in the fall.

Schedules? How can they hope to stand up to inspiration?

When Do You Say Goodbye?

by Janis Patterson

I’m stunned.

An organization I belong to – one I helped found decades ago and one on whose board I now sit – is now seriously discussing the possibility of closing down. Just the mention of such a possibility breaks my heart.

I literally sweated blood for this organization, sometimes staying up all night to get my duties done even though at the time I was single, working both a full time and a part time job and looking after an ill parent. For several years it was touch and go whether it would survive or not, but it did and blossomed into a marvelous group that was widely known and respected. The glory years were great.

But – the old guard who had forged this group stepped down, or retired, or moved, or died, and new people arose to take over the management duties. Isn’t that the way it’s supposed to be? I guess ‘supposed’ is the operative word here. Nobody looks after your baby like you do. Mismanagement, both accidental and perhaps deliberate, and ego wars took their toll, and internecine warfare raised its ugly head. By the time the old guard both caught on to what was causing the slow decline and managed to get into position to halt it, great damage had been done.

And now even though we are in charge once more, we aren’t sure we can reverse it. Even if we do, there is the specter of who can we trust to succeed us? We’re old. We’re tired. We’ve earned our right to simply sit back and enjoy the benefits of that which we created. But into whose hands can we entrust it? During the time of decline membership declined as well, leaving a small and very insignificant field of those who could and would step up.

We can go on this way for a little while. Hopefully we can restore our group to a reasonable facsimile of its old self and even more hopefully that will bring people in of the caliber and dedication that the group deserves. Hopefully. If not, though, we will have no choice but to kill this living and wondrous thing that we imagined and grew instead of letting it die an agonizingly slow death until just two or three of us can still totter to the meetings.

Perhaps I am just being morbid. Perhaps we can revitalize the group and make it stronger and better than before. One can only hope. I am sanguine enough to know that nothing lasts forever… that all things end sometime. But, dear God, please not now. Not now.