I’m a little bit of an oxymoron—I’m an organized mess.

The motivations behind this blog have shifted a few times in the past year. The original idea didn’t even include book reviews; that came later when I realized I knew little of self-publishing. There’s a novel, a work in progress, out there I helped write that I would love to see published one day, sitting proudly on my bookcase in my living room. There are a lot of steps before we get there, though. By learning to promote others, we will learn to promote ourselves—that’s the idea, anyway.


When it comes to organization, though, I’m a little bit of an oxymoron—I’m an organized mess. I could write an entire blog post (perhaps even an entire book) on the reasons why, but to sum up, let’s just say I’m lazy, absent-minded, and suffer from bipolar mania.

This project was a little slow going in the first few months, which discouraged me for a time. It took me a while to organize our first book giveaway, in part because of the discouragement. I felt overwhelmed. If my future self would have told me what all we would be attempting this spring, I might have just killed over. We have a lot going on, and it’s taxing my oxymoronic brain. The mania creates ideas, but the absent-mindedness and laziness pull them back down to reality at times.

When I was trying to put that first giveaway together, several followers expressed interest, asking me to send them more info via email. Knowing myself as I do, I declined. I knew I would get lost. It’s even worse today. When I do correspond by email, it doesn’t take long for your message to fall on the second page of my inbox, which pretty much wipes it from memory. I do have a couple memory aides, though.

First, I bought a paper planner from Wal-Mart. I haven’t found its full potential yet, but I’ll keep trying. So far I’ve been using it to preschedule posts and remind myself about major stuff in the near future. Finding a way to remind myself about all the small details—that’s another matter altogether.

Second, I use Google Docs extensively, which allows me to work on just about any computer. All the forms you see on this site are connected to Docs, so when you fill out a form, your answers are deposited onto an online spreadsheet, accessible only to my crew—and not even all of them.

The biggest advantage here is I won’t lose stuff forever. I may misplace it for a while, but there’s a built in reminder system. As long as you formally express interest in some aspect of our site, I will get back to you eventually, even if I’ve forgotten our email correspondence. My email is searchable, but I have to have something to flag my memory to instigate the search in the first place.

As a side note, in some forms I ask you to separate your paragraphs, such as guest posts and reviews. If more than 100 words are in a blank, I cannot see your entire post on my screen, which makes using Docs nearly impossible. I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. Also, the forms on this site are not designed to be filled out by phone. In these cases, I suggest you favor the tweet and come back when you are at a computer.

To encourage communication, I have finally created a Contact Us page, which (YES) does use another Google Docs form. You can find a link to it in the top navigation bar. If you have any ideas for the site in general or (specifically) ideas to help me organize myself more, I would love to hear from you.