You Again and Again and Again and Again . . .

So this time I am going to finish a book. I’ve got three different major projects started (not counting the minor ones) and I want to work along with the McDaniel students so I had to pick one and get serious. It’s You Again.

I have 60,000 words done, most of them unpublishable. So I gathered up everything I’d done on the book since 2002 when I started it. Four hundred and eighty-one documents and folders with more documents in them. I made four new folders: Drafts, Notes, Images, Research. I sorted everything I had into those folders, and then I went through and deleted everything that was redundant or unreadable (some of the files did not survive the years).

I cleaned out the Notes Folder last night. Now it has nine folders in it: Blurbs/Titles (6 docs including poetry and the acknowledgements), Character (11 docs), Crits (1 doc), Outlines (54 docs including four synopses), Scrivener (3 docs), Time (4 docs), and the You Again Voodoo doc. That’s a lot of notes, and it doesn’t count the research docs (26). All of which I have to wade through. Plus the images folder: 264 jpgs, and I’m missing a lot so there’s another folder of those some place.

And then there’s the drafts folder. Dear God, I did keep writing. Over four hundred documents in there. I started that over a decade ago and never stopped writing it. I think that’s either a good sign–I really want to write it–or a bad sign–I obviously can’t write it. What I’m hoping for is that I’ll find work of such brilliance it will inspire me once again. What I’ll get is a lot of rough draft, much of it useless, some of salvageable with a rewrite.

Oh, well. It’s a process. Now I need to go find what I did with the collage . . .