I’ve been submitting/self-publishing
stories for just over twenty years. I
think at first, I just kept track of things in a notebook, but I eventually
decided to make an Excel document to keep track of everything. I had the story’s title, where I submitted
it, when I submitted it, when I heard back, and what the result was. Later, I started keeping track of the stories
that were published. I did this by
numbering them in the order they were published, as well as turning their entry
red. The importance of the numbering is
that sometimes I’d submit a story somewhere and not hear back for over a month,
during which time I was posting stories each week on my website.
This worked well for
years, but then I had a problem. I’ve
published hundreds of stories on my webpage – most are only a few hundred words
– and I don’t remember them all. One
time I remembered writing a story about, I don’t know, aliens landing at Mardi
Gras, but I couldn’t remember what the title was. So I scrolled through story after story,
until I finally found … “Party Planet,” or whatever. Knowing that something similar would
eventually happen again, I decided it would be nice to have, not detailed
descriptions of every story, but something like “Aliens land at Mardi Gras,”
which I could quickly search for and find.
The easy thing to do
would be to just add this on to the existing list, but I figured it would be
nice to have a list of just my published stories in the order they were
published. I got to work and soon had a
list, and then I had to go to the story, refamiliarize myself with it, then
write up a blurb. And that should have
been it.
Unfortunately, I made a
mistake somewhere. Well, a couple of
mistakes. Like, #500 on my Submissions
List is #502 on my Publications List.
But, #400 is #399, and #300 is #301.
This isn’t a new problem. I made
my Publications List several years ago, so I’ve known of this mismatch. Unfortunately, fixing this issue is #439 on
my “It would be nice to do this someday list,” and I have a thousand things on
my, “I should do list,” not to mention the thousand things on my, “To do list.”
A couple years ago, when
I was getting close to publishing my 600th story, I figured I should go through
and find my mistakes to know which story it was. But life happened and I never did. And now I’m inching closer to Number 700, and
I figured I should really get to it, this time.
For sure. Part of my forcing
myself to do this, was to write this post about the importance of keeping track
of your stories. I could explain the issues
I have, and then in a few months I can do an update about how I finally sat
down and did the work and can finally say exactly how many stories I’d
published.
Well, I have starting redoing
both lists. I’m redoing both to make
sure I don’t miss anything. I’ve barely
started, and I’ve already found a couple mistakes. I have no idea how long this project will
take, because I’m also doing something else.
In an early draft of this post, I mentioned that I had published over
600 stories, and while that sounds impressive, probably half of them are under
500 words. And then I realized it would
be nice to know how many of stories are under 500 words, or over 5,000 or
whatever category I want to put them in.
So now I’m redoing both lists, and then also hunting down the stories
and seeing how long they are. This is a
project I’ll slowly be working on for months.
Will I finish it before #700?
Only time will tell.
So if you’re a beginning
writer, I’d say start keeping track of everything you can, because someday you’ll
wish you had. And going back to do it
all later can be super annoying.
***
Image from Pixabay.
