Creatives are organisers too!

We've all seen it in movies - the scene where the writer struggles up from their desk and stumbles over to the fridge, only to find that the milk is empty and they've forgotten to go shopping and so they eat a bowl of dry cereal before stumbling back to the computer and diving back into the world again.

It happens. We do get so caught up in our writing that we forget basic stuff. Paying the bills. Getting food in the cupboard. Having showers...

But don't think that writers are like this ALL the time. Those that are don't make it. The rest of us are capable of being very organised. Everyone here at the Supernatural Underground is a very capable person, because we wouldn't be published authors if we weren't.

There's lots of organisational stuff that comes with being an author. Getting an agent and/or a publisher requires a lot of paperwork, sending of emails, responding to queries and the like. Then there's organising promotion - be it as simple as getting postcards printed or remembering to put up a blog post you've committed to, or a massive tour such as Melissa Marr and Kelley Armstrong are currently putting together. And because we're self-employed, there taxes to worry about...

Then there's organisation in our actual lives. We KNOW what we're like when we're lost in a book, and that can be amplified if we're coming up to deadline, so we plan around that. We have work plans and we get our lives, our homes, set up to help us achieve them. If we're lucky, we've got family to help share the burden. If not - then we plan ahead with pre-cooked meals and the like.

Over the past couple of days, I've gone into my computer hard-drive and re-organised all my files. Over the past few years, it's gone all a bit unwieldy. Now, it's organised and on any given day, I know where to go to for work I'm currently doing, or work I want to revisit, or how to check my progress on projects.

I've planned my progress for the next few weeks, I've got everything I need to do marked up on a calendar and sending me reminders and I've got the meals planned out. So now I've got the brainspace to let myself go in my story and be secure in the knowledge that when I surface again, my world won't have fallen in a heap around me. It will look tattered, but it will still be standing.