No one ever told me

There's a whole host of things that no one ever told me about being a writer. Little things, like spending time writing means that you'll have far less time to read. Big things, as in selling your first book isn't an end, it's merely when you reset the goal line.

And no one ever told me that being a writer is all about the paperwork. In this case, I'm referring to my research notes. For the current WiP, I'm currently trying to dig myself out from under a sea of paper.

For the past two months I've been scrawling in notebooks, on scraps of paper and the backs of printouts, then periodically gathering everything up and entering it into a file. The file is now over twenty pages long, filled with everything from factoids on certification exams to musings on backstory and possible character arcs. Some early story ideas are contradicted by later ones, and there's a whole list of open questions that I need to keep track of so I can go back and fill in the blanks. Obviously much of this is information that will never make it into the final story, but it's all grist for the mill at this point, and I don't want to lose track of it.

In my dreams I have time to enter all this data into a database or personal wiki, to make it easier to organize and search.

In reality, I'll go through the current notes and create two MS-Word files. The first will be my worldbuilding file, with sections for: Timeline, Characters (People), Places, Things, Facts, and a list of Topics to be Researched. The second file is my story notes file, which will contain ideas for scenes, scraps of dialogue, settings or images I want to use, et cetera.

Then there are hardcopy folders with the other stuff I've been gathering--maps, organizational charts, research articles, photographs/diagrams, copies of notes from interviews with various experts, etc.

Hopefully when I pull all this together, I'll feel less out of control. At least until the next stack of notes accumulates :-)