A WRITER'S GUIDELINES

I am always clipping articles from all sorts of sources that I feel might prove beneficial later. Recently, I decided it was time to go through some of those clippings, weed them out and, just maybe, find something useful at the moment. In that context, I came across "Creating a Writer's Guidebook" by Michelle Mach, published in ByLine Magazine, September 20o6. She wrote that she tracks her submissions by creating a book each year of what she writes.

Mach copies all of the work she has produced within the year. She says this gives her a look at what she has accomplished. She makes these two-sided copies and divides them into published and unpublished. Usually, the unpublished is a larger stack than the other but that is not a bad thing--it shows she is continuously writing and attempting to publish. She includes rejection letters/slips, acceptances, reviews, submission records, and goals for that particular year. She even keeps a list of books read for the year. She has these bound in volumes that she keeps handy so she can compare how she grows from year to year-hopefully.

I must have thought this was a good idea then, as I still think so today. But I haven't done it. I do keep a submissions list so I can track what I have sent out but I have no idea of what I have written in each given year. A great deal of my time in recent years has been devoted to writing novels which would be a little cumbersome to bind and keep.

This shuuld be the year I do this. I haven't done much (yet)writing of anything but a novel, novella and rewrites of old fiction so it shouldn't take too long to begin my stack to compile into a book at the end of 2009. But just maybe I should start submitting some other writing before the year gets too far gone.

Maybe this is something we could all do, right?