My secret weapon

I don’t make much secret of the fact that Donna & I are crazy jugglers.  There are two of us, and that makes it easier to multi-task.  We write a little faster than one person on their own, we can write on multiple projects, and when one of us is doing edits, the other is handling promo.  We don’t have individual careers independent of our Moira Rogers work, which means there are two people giving their full time 100% focus to this career.

Of course, now that we’re at the point where we write almost everything on proposal, we have reached a point where we need to make sure we’re not committing to things we’re not going to be able to pull off.  Not just writing-wise, but writing when we’ll have new releases, galleys or edits to worry about.  That’s why we have… the spreadsheet.

Not always as updated as it should be.

The spreadsheet has upcoming projects, tentative release dates, word counts, due dates, sale dates, galleys, edits and more.  We can also estimate how much we’d have to write on X project every month to have it done by Y date, and in general we try not to estimate more than 15k per project and no more than 30k per month across all projects, to give us wiggle room.

As months go by and projects are finalized, I hide rows to keep it current.  It took me a while to come up with a format I really like, but this is my secret weapon in keeping stuff organized.

Since someone asked, I uploaded a template here: Deadline Spreadsheet Template. I doubt it will work for everyone, but I loooove the thing.  <3  And hey, if my deadlines are organized, I don’t have to explain why my desk is a mess, right?

Right?

Ahem.