Keeping a WiP List aka my endless list of projects

[meridian_rose]

Inspired by a Snowflake Challenge participant mentioning starting a WiP document and that the upcoming February theme at ushobwri is Works in Progress.

I highly recommend a WiP document. Someone rec'd this about a billion years ago in fandom terms and I was all "what, every idea I've ever had wtf, how can I even?".

I started the thing and it took a bit to get into it but now it is the Awesome. And yes, even now I still sometimes find older idea to add to the Endless Spreadsheet, or do a small project without it ever getting recorded, but overall, my gosh it works.

Under the cut is a lot of rambling and a few visuals.
I went back and forth about what to specifically share/show but I think I'm ok with this. Please don't judge me, I am a multifandom mess of h/c ideas but also can be overly organised to the point of pedantry

My WiP document is titled "my endless list of projects" and is an Excel Spreadsheet.

I decided to use a spreadsheet because I could track multiple aspects and then search them by fandom or type.
Each row gets a new number typed in, their unique ID as it were.
The next column is type: original fic, fanfic, but also things like fanvid, fanmix. graphics.
The third row is something about type; hurt/comfort, action adventures, comedy & fluff, au, crossover fic, inspired by song lyric.
The next row is fandom or fandoms for multi, or orig work.
The biggie is the next row. This is where I put a sentence or a paragraph and/or a note where I've got a partial draft written. Might also say "see other notes"
I sometimes highlight rows that I have works that are currently in progress and should be finished instead of remaing WiP forever a long time. So things with deadlines like Yuletide, Small Fandom Big Bang.



This example I more trouble deciding what to share (it's one thing to share finished products but another to show the dirty workings of what might be!) but this snippet shows my current SFBB in progress [somewhat redacted], a fic that might be jossed and get moved to the archive when I watch the next season, an AU I might write but also did request for Yuletide, and a non fic entry. The spreadsheet rows run from 380-384 but note the numbers of the ideas recorded are higher because each new entry gets its own number. My next row at the bottom of the entire spreadsheet is numbered 464 in readiness but that's only row 409 according to Excel.

But that's not all! I have other worksheeets to keep me organised!


The next worksheet is for completed works. I cut and paste a completed row into that, sorted by year. Because I like to see what I've actually completed.


That image shows the last few things I posted to AO3 last year. I haven't yet posted this year so 2024 is ready but the first line is still blank.I posted 21 works from the spreadsheet last year (plus I logged 4 fics that I'd posted to LJ/DW back in the day and edited and posted those to AO3 so they didn't have associated numbers)
This doesn't include all my icons/other graphics/fanmixes I made for things like lands_of_magic and genprompt_bingo which I just made and posted mostly to my journal and not to AO3.

The third worksheet/tab is "archived" for when I'm 99.999% sure I'll never write/make that thing but I don't want to just delete things so it goes here for posterity. I've got 18 items in that tab and the most recent three were all because canon thoroughly jossed it/did {almost) the exact same thing.

Then a fourth sheet is other notes. This is where I add the number from the first row and then type as much as I want into the secon column. It's a way to store longer notes.


Image only shows start of the second column; I colour code and paste as much as I want into the second column so it takes up all the visible space and when clicked into shows the entire text.

Sometimes I have used multiple rows if there's whole paragraphs including dialogue that I want to keep as separate lines. Like this example, for a SurrealEstate WiP.
The entry in the spreadsheet is
378 fanfic h/c, whump surrealestate witchcraft, roman attacked see notes
But the other notes are extensive as can be seen in this screencap though I've blurred the text as this is a WiP I'm still figuring out and some of the material would require warnings.


click for full siza

If I've got a lot of ideas for a specific fandom/orig work I might make a new worksheet just to store those so the main spreadsheet has 002/Fanfic/various/Fandom/See other notes. Keeps the main spreadsheet from filling up with bitesize ficlets I might never actually write in that one fandom.

Other ideas and notes is the place I shove things that I really can't make work in the main spreadsheet but want to keep a record of. And the last worksheet is for archiving off the "other notes" as "completed archive notes". Because I never delete things.


I still gather notes and ideas everywhere. The most common are at cloud based writing site the internet typewriter -not least of all in my journal at that site though I do have a doc there just for ideas to copy them over to, and Keep notes which has been a revelation as I can add at the pc or on my kindle at night or on my phone especially if I'm pet sitting away from home.
Every so often I sweep all these bits and pieces into the internet typewriter "ideas to add" document. Open up the spreadsheet. Write them up. Move them to the bottom of the document "added". Copy the updated added things to a Word document on the pc too because i'm paranoid.
I also back up the newly updated spreadsheet to my Google Drive. You can use any cloud service. You could use Google Sheets to do this all online.

Knowing I have the spreadsheet to collate to means I am better at making brief notes somewhere and then adding them so I can find them later.

It doesn't matter what form your wip document takes because this looks like A Lot - but it only took a bit of work to begin and then evolved to reflect how I like to store my data - the important thing is you have somewhere that collates all those misc tidbits and dialogue snippets and wacky AU ideas and random what-ifs that came to you and that you will forget if you don't put them somewhere!

And yes, over 400 is a lot, and no I'll probably never do them all, especially as my PC is very old and doesn't like making vids any longer, but the point is to store the ideas because maybe some do get written/made - or inspire me for something else when I look through them.

Plus updating the completed tab gives great satisfaction.

So that's my process at the moment.

Comments

[kitarella_imagines]

I suppose they aren't deadlines, they're more 'when I can fit it in' e.g. I always write a long fic over the Christmas holidays as that time of year is usually dull, gloomy, depressing. Same goes for the summer holidays, they're often lonely and boring so I write a long fic. I schedule fics in for those times.

I don't think I have as many ideas as you do 😋