Grunt Work

It's that time of year again. Tax time. Umm, yay?

Anyway, that's what I've been up to this weekend. Gotta love the fact that in order to use TurboTax this year, I had to download Firefox - because TT doesn't work with IE on this old an operating system. =op---

So now I have Firefox. Uhh... ok. I don't really care which browser I use. I don't need bells or whistles as long as it gets me where I need to go, when I need to go there. I'm still using IE for everything else (if it ain't broke, don't fix it).

As a related side rant, why the hell do people think they need to keep fixing things that aren't broken, and breaking things that work fine? That's messed up. Seriously.

Now I really have to get back to work, so maybe one of these days I can show income under Novelist. Ya know what I mean?

Working in the Store

While I pull my head out of whatever orifice it's jammed into at the moment, I'm reading and working on my bookstore. (If you weren't already aware, I sell used books through Amazon. I'm not going to get rich, but it feeds my book-buying addiction, and I hope gives some people who can't afford new books a chance to read.)

Anyway, that's what I've been hip-deep in for the past few days. After we moved in October, I never took the time to reorganize my stock. Around 1500 books in no particular order, spread through three rooms. Ever try to alphabetize that many books? It ain't pretty. Still, considering what a pain it was to find anything, in the long run it'll be worth it.

Oh, and the unhappy circumstance that while I was moving about a third of my stock dropped out of my listings... Well, now that I have them organized and sorted, I'm in the process of relisting those 500 or so books. Weeee.

On the upside, it's keeping my mind off my recent slump. Here's hoping all that physical labor shakes something in my head loose. (Not that there aren't already a lot of things loose up there. They're just the wrong things.)

As for the reading front, I just finished book #13 for the year so far. (If you haven't read G.A. Aiken's dragon books yet, get thee out and buy both. You won't regret it - they're hot.) That's way ahead of last year, and if I read at this pace, I'll be looking at around twice the number read this year than last. I'm hoping I don't have this much time to read all year, but I'm trying to look on the bright side.

How's your life going? Read any good books lately?

Grunt Work

We all have what I call 'grunt work'. It's the stuff behind the writing that we'd all rather not do, but that's really necessary for keeping yourself sane. I'm talking about paperwork, and filing, and receipts, and taxes... The list goes on. It's secretarial stuff for which we all wish we had the funds to pay someone else to do. (Actually, someone else used to pay me to do this stuff for them, but that was in my before-writing life.)

Today, for me, it's database work. I have piles of agent information from at least two books ago that I've never entered into my database. (I've been too busy writing, but that's no excuse.) Plus, I am embarking on the search for an agent with RTL, and now I have all that to enter. I'll never keep it straight in my head. The whos, the whats, the whens get jumbled up in there if I don't keep it organized.

So, since I'm off work, I'm tackling the piles.

What I use to keep all of this organized is an antiquated DOS-based contact management program. It doesn't have the bells and whistles of its newer versions, but it works for me. It's very simple, straightforward and almost idiot-proof. As long as the information is entered, and entered correctly, that is. If I want to see who those few agents are who got Blink before I got distracted with writing RTL, all I would have to do is pull up the file and I could see who got what when. Right now, however, that information is in a pile on the floor next to me. Ack.

Tell me, what do you use to keep yourself organized? Do you keep on top of it, or are you like me with piles of files scattered around you in disarray until you get fed up with it?