What’s In My Sandbox

These days, I do all of my writing, save my blogging, in Google Docs. I have a series of scripts that track this writing automatically for me. My “In Progress” work goes into a folder I call my “Sandbox.” At any given time, my sandbox contains a dozen or more files, all things in various stages of progress. As of this moment, here is what is in my sandbox

• 4 files that make up my current long work-in-progress. And by long, I mean 35,000 words as of yesterday. For simplicity sake, I start a new document every 10,000 words. This makes it a little easier to manage for me and it also makes it easy to know how long the thing is getting at a glance: 4 documents = somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000 words.
• 4 more files represent different short stories, each in a separate, but relatively early, stage of completion. I expect two of these stories will come in at under 5,000 words. As for the other two, it is hard to say.
• 1 file is a poem I started to write, but have not finished and may not come back to. I am not a poet. I simply had an idea that I tried out. I don’t think it was all that successful.
• 3 of the files are various pieces of nonfiction I’ve written, all final drafts, all submitted and/or published. Meaning I can probably clean them out of my sandbox and move them elsewhere.

And that’s pretty much it. I try to limit what goes in my sandbox to actual working documents. Once the work on them is done, I move them to some other folder. There should really only be 8 documents in my sandbox, but I’ve gotten lazy, it seems. At some point, I need to clean up.