I have a book due April 15th that is squarely in the legal, romantic suspense genre. As I’m racing to finish the book, we’re squarely in the middle of titling the book and series. I wrote 75K words for this book before January, and then paused to write another book, and have been back at this one since around February 15th.
In many ways that pause was a great help. It let me gain distance from the book and back up to think about structure and story issues. But now I’m racing to deadline, and working to increase the suspense and get all the pacing and details nailed down. One of my authorly quirks is that I like to keep my chapters approximately the same length, and I like to see the word count grow. Here’s a quick snapshot of my word count spreadsheet. In this one I also track the day that each chapter occurs.
Because this is the first book in a series, I’ve also created a spreadsheet to track character names and basic details. On one of my next sweeps through the book, I may add physical details. It takes a little bit of time now to build this as I edit, but if this turns into a 4+ book series, it will be very helpful to me in the long term to make sure I keep names different and the details about returning characters consistent. I guess you could say a minute used now could save hours later.
I need to build a spreadsheet with a list of places that I use and their descriptions. Because the book is set in Old Town Alexandria, many of the places are real. You could walk down King Street and eat at Il Porto. I’ve created a Pinterest board to help track the locations, especially the heroine’s home. I’ve learned the hard way that if I don’t pin the picture, when a home goes off the market, I can no longer see the photos. 
These photos help me stay consistent in what the different homes look like as well as save me time from researching what the inside of a restaurant looks like.
These are a few of the tools I use as I’m writing to stay on top of my writing and word count. Here’s one last shot of my writing buddy many nights. He likes to be in the middle of everything. 
If you’re a writer do you use spreadsheets and Pinterest? What tools do you use to stay organized? And as readers, I hope you enjoyed this behind the scenes look at my zaniness!
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I use both spreadsheets (for my character names to sort by first or last) and Pinterest (a place to post photos of my character inspirations and settings). But mostly I use Scrivener. It tells me when I get up each day how many words I must write in order to stay on track on my deadline. And it does so much more beyond that.
One of these days, I’ll figure out how to really use Scrivener. So far I haven’t.
Hi Cara, great tools! Thanks for sharing.
Carrie
Thanks for popping by, Carrie. Hope all is well!
You organized ladies are amazing! I’m very lo-tech in comparison with my manila file folders and old-fashioned cork bulletin boards. Maybe it’s because I write historical fiction. I’m staying in character (ha!).
If I had the wall space, I’d use bulletin boards. Instead, I think of pinterest as a very movable board. I also am known to use a lot of comments to capture my research in the manuscript itself.
I keep track of book details in regular old Word documents. One long doc each for the hero and heroine. And then a ‘Secondary Characters’ doc that lists out info for all the minor characters. A doc that includes all the scenes I can imagine in the novel. For my Porter family, I also had a doc just for keeping up with everyone’s ages across all four books. And I have a running ‘timeline’ doc on which I list the dates that the all the scenes in a given novel take place.
I have Pinterest boards for each of my books and an ‘inspiration’ board where I collect all types of pins. I absolutely agree that Pinterest boards are a great way to corral book data and visual images!
I don’t tend to use spreadsheets to keep book info straight, but I can definitely see how they’d be helpful. I’m getting to the point where I do think I need a ‘master list’ spreadsheet of character names. That way I won’t inadvertently re-use a first or last name I’ve already used (and forgotten I used) in a previous story. 🙂
Those character names are tricky! And since this is the first book in a series, I decided I wanted to be more intentional from the beginning. A Word document can work very much the same way. I’ve been known to do similar things in a table in Word.
Great insight, Cara! Thanks for the peek into your process. I use a spreadsheet for my word count for the first draft. It’s helpful to keep me motivated, because I love seeing that number climb. I’ve only recently begun using Pinterest as a sort of inspiration board. I find pictures that are as similar as I can get to how I’ve imagined the scenes/characters/etc. in my mind as I’m writing the story. Another thing I’m obsessed with, probably more than either of the other ones, is notebooks. I always start with a notebook and pen or pencil in hand, and that’s where I keep track of all the details about each character/place/season/etc. There’s nothing quite like flipping those pages and hearing the schoof-schoof as I’m going from one page to the next to update such-and-such a character’s details.
I love the use of the notebooks, Andrea. And there is something very motivating about watching the word count climb.
I really enjoy reading series of all kinds… legal, suspense, mail-order-bride, families, etc. I was glad to read in your blog above, that continuity is important to you. I use Excel for many things, but one of them is to chart a series that I am reading (whatever that might be). This is mostly because my retention rate is seriously pitiful. Using this tool as a reader, I often find inconsistencies that irritate me. I’ve never given up on an author because of it, but it does throw me for a loop sometimes. Thanks for the care you take in charting your work. It tells me that not only do you care about your words (an obvious statement), but you care about your readers. Thank you.