Well, my first couple of nights back in the work place proved interesting. I'm blessed to have this job. I work a 12- hour shift but have plenty free time during the night. Instead of knitting or reading in between rounds, I take my laptop and write. There's no on-line distractions, only around 60 patients/residents. And they mostly sleep -- unlike the Internet.
The first night I designed my first-ever
one-sheet for one of the books I'm hoping to pitch at the
Florida Christian Writers Conference in (gulp!) 174 days. (That's when I leave home.)
The second night I started to assemble my book of devotions. That's when I discovered the awful truth. I have organised myself into well-categorised chaos.
- I've completed over 90 devotions. I have a careful list of them all, complete with a one sentence summary of each message.
- I've edited 16 of them, and they're safely in a folder entitled "Edited Devotions" which is a sub-folder of "Cancer Devotions".
- The other 70+ are written, titled and saved. Now all I need to do is find them.
Here are some of the challenges:
- I have several folders for the devotions, each with their own sub-folders. Why? I have no idea. It obviously seemed good at the time.
- In my super-efficient mode, I have learned to synchronise the folders between my computer and my laptop using XP's Briefcase. It works brilliantly. But I've only done certain folders. Another why.
- Where I wrote the initial devotions in yWriter, I have since saved them into different formats for editing. But, I've used two different programmes: MS Word and Open Office.
So that's easy, right? I can do a search.
Absolutely. But here are the next two challenges.
- When I completed my Book Proposal, I improved many of the titles.
- I also used two computers -- my desktop and my laptop.
I've been working (and searching) on my laptop at work so I'm praying -- hard -- that the missing devotions are safely on my desktop at home. All I need to do is find them.
I wonder if this is a specific Shirley-idiocy, or if others have also organised themselves into chaos. Any comments?
