Woe to the organizationally-challenged author of a series.

So quite a while back I ordered WriteWay Pro, fully intending to use it in place of a bazillion notebooks, Post-Its and paper scraps. I played with it a bit, but I’m a creature of habit and I’m more likely to jot things down in random places. One of my bigger obstacles is the fact I don’t really sit in one place—notebooks and paper scraps are fully portable and I can drag them around the house with me.

It’s time to dust off the program, I think, and spend a few days setting up files for characters and whatnot. It’ll be time-consuming, but no more so than flipping through books and word docs looking for that one detail I need. In the past couple of weeks I’ve had to look up all sorts of things, such as the name of one of the DG guys and what color hair Sadie has in TEJ. I had to look up favorite weapons for Alex and Grace—one has a Glock, the other a Sig, and do you think I could remember which was which? The name of the newspaper in TEJ. Then there’s the secret project, which also has a fairly large cast of characters—including four boys whose names I can’t for the life of me keep straight.

It’s time to bite the bullet and go through manuscripts, culling all those little details and compiling them in one place—WriteWay Pro seems the best bet. I thought about setting up a binder system for each series, but since I work on more than one book at a time, I’d have to hook the wagon up to my Rubicon to haul it all around with me. And we have a rule—no ATVs in the house.

There’s a part of me resisting the idea—I want to be creative, dammit, not spend time compiling and filing. But stopping to hunt through every page of the first two DG books looking for anyplace I might have mentioned an actual age for Gallagher isn’t helping the creative process any, either.

Can I just say it blows my mind readers can catch continuity errors in a series? I can’t even remember names from one book to the next.