Elaine White's Life in Books

I'm not a writer. Not in the sense of “pick up pen, put to paper”. I've probably mentioned before that I've got nerve damage in my hands? That makes writing, physically, pretty hard for me. Holding a pen for more than note taking, aka a shopping list of bullet points, can be painful or cause tingling, like when your hand falls asleep. So, I have to avoid doing that as much as possible.

Yet, I can't resist a good notebook. I keep one by my bed for notes that bug me in the middle of the night. One in my bag, for lists, to do reminders, and stuff that's likely to be important but which I've forgotten about ten minutes later. That kind of thing.

But...give me a laptop and you can't stop me!

It sounds ridiculous, I know. But, check my laptop and you'll see I'm right. I have a searchable spreadsheet of all the DVD's we own. No lie. My memory is terrible, so I spent time organising, listing, placing, and writing up the spreadsheet so that if I'm looking for a specific movie or TV show that we have, I can just search for it and find out, at a glance, if we have it. I have a searchable inventory of my bedroom. DON'T LAUGH!

I'm forever losing things, and I actually have cognitive issues as an after-effect of my chemo treatment years ago. So, legitimately, I have memory issues, and I find that lists and documents really help. Especially since I can copy/paste, move things around, reorganise, and search them. You'd be amazed at what you'd find on my laptop.

I have documents for my bucket list, for my medical information. I have a spreadsheet with a list of every book I own, whether paperback or e-book, with the title, series, page number all listed. I also have folders to help organise some of those files, like to collect all my Instagram notes into one place, folders for FB, Twitter, BookLikes – I use these folders to collect things over time, then use them to schedule my pages at the start of each month. As an author, I also have spreadsheets for character names, potential titles, a list of dates for when I finished books, a list of blurbs for WIP's, taglines for published books, and a folder of publishing related documents.

I have documents and folders for everything under the sun. It's how I function. By keeping lists. I even have my Kindle folder divided into Netgalley, Divine, TBR, and then by genre.

It's obsessive, but I couldn't have it any other way. Some people write lists on paper or in notebooks. I keep documents and folders. While I love the joy of scribbling or scratching out a completed task from a list, I'm also a bit of a hoarder. I can't throw anything away and having a laptop allows me to do that. I can keep 15 versions of a document on my hard drive without clogging up my laptop, while making sure I don't lose that information, in case I ever need it again. Who knows when a stray idea might come in handy?