We’ve been talking all about organizing your edited stories, and this is the next step in that process, should you find it helpful. We look at tracking the versions of our stories, so with a quick glance, you can see where you are in the editing process for each piece.
I purchased the Scrivener program, so have been using that. The thing I’m not crazy about is that it doesn’t keep versions in case I want to go back and look. I have been printing them out, but that wastes paper and ink. I like your system Patricia and I am going to try it. Thanks for sharing.
Julie, Stella uses Scrivener, so she might be able to shed some light on tracking older draft versions. But, I agree, if you incorporate anything that Patricia recommends, it will only help save time and stress.
When I wrote my first memoir, I did not keep a tracking system. I wrote by the seat of my pants and kept a chronological order of the events in my head, but I see how useful this system might be for me to organize the many short stories I wrote over the years. I might use a spreadsheet to list them all and save them with a V.1 at the end, or if there are many versions, I would increase the number. This way, I could see the combined word count for everything I wrote so far.
Thanks, Patricia.
I like this system. Hopefully, it will bring some clarity to my stories. I have them in a partial book order, but continue to add stories, so maybe this will do the trick.
I really like your system and use something very similar. One difference is that I use rev.1.0 and rev.1.5 because I learned to do that from work. Most of the people i work with are retired military and they use rev.instead of version. I assume it is a government thing. I use an Excel spreadsheet similar to yours except I have added columns for when I sent the document out for review and when I received it back because some of the people I send documents too are lax on returning them and it is a simple way to see… Read more »