First of all, I would like to say: look at my awesome new coif! Look at how purple it is! (Actually, it isn’t quite that purple right now. I am on holiday and American water apparently hates my hair. As soon as I get my hands on some purple dye though!)

Anyhow, I come to today with a controversial thesis statement, to whit: organisation is better than sex.

I spent last weekend ripping my Evernote filing system (LINK!) back to bare boards and then rebuilding it from scratch. I have now divided it into major topic notebooks – Science, Locations, Food (I have a lot of gluten free recipes that I like to keep on hand), Pretty Stuff, Crime – and then broke them down by a selection of carefully curated tags – murder, sci-fi, apocalypse, hot dudes. I also have a miscellaneous file for stuff you want to grab on the run from your iPhone but don’t want to tag and assign a notebook right then and there.

  
I also have a few notebooks that are event specific. For example, I am going to Somerset with Fala Black, Penny Rogers, Rhys Ford and Halle later this year. So I have a Five go to Somerset notebook that has cottage rentals, car hire, and places to eat that are gluten-free, cool, or have a ‘surly waitress with a bone in her ear’ and where, frankly, I will be disappointed if she ISN’T surly with us. 

Anyhow, that is what my weekend was spent doing and it led me to three revelations.

1: I love Evernote, but you do have to put the elbow grease in to keep it organised if you want it to be useful. I have had it for years, and half my tags were misspelled, there was lower/uppercase redundancies, and a lot of stuff wasn’t even tagged because I had just shoved it in there for later and never got around to properly categorising it. As a writer, I do find Evernote invaluable. I can take pictures of things and they will automatically title themselves with locations, I can add audio notes or text notes to entries to jog my memory about why this topic interested me in the first place. If you know what you are looking for, you can also search by keyword. I tend to use tags instead of keywords for my books. That way I can repurpose the research later if it I need to. However, as long as you work out a system and stick to it Evernote is awesome. You can ever use it as a to do list.

2: If anyone else ever gets access to my Evernote, the sheer number of crime tags is going to require explanation. It is all serial killers, murder, arson, and recommendations for books about serial killers. I also have a lot of survivalist stuff in there – for apocalyptic scenarios! – but that doesn’t really help my case.

3: The aforementioned notion that organisation is better that sex. Yes, I know. Sex can be great, not arguing that. However, if you spend a whole weekend having sex all over the house then you are going to get chafing, and possibly a UTI. If you have sex in a cafe, you will probably get arrested. If you have a quick over the pants fondle on a train, then someone is going to give you a dirty look. Organisation, however, can happen anywhere and people will actually just think better of you!

I mean, I clipped an article about Charlotte Bronte going a bit stalkery over Constantin Héger while I was writing this article.

In fairness, I should admit that I also claimed that my steam hair straighteners were better than sex, but that was hyperbole.

Oh, and anyone who enjoyed my post on auditioning narrators? My SF Labyrinth of Stone is now available as an audiobook!