This is actually spurred on by a from a new twitter friend (mjmbecky) during a #bblog session hosted by Nicole Bo about Time Management and Blogging.

I had mentioned that I have notebooks filled with notes about books I am reading, or have read, post-it notes and an inch thick of lists for my blog.  Well Becky suggested I share this with y'all XD  I wish I could offer pictures, but sadly my camera is still broke.

Lists
I like making lists.  I have made lists of everything under the sun since I was old enough to hold a pencil.  This comes in handy when I'm moving, needing to go shopping, compare things or see the progress on what I should be doing.  Blogging isn't any different in that regard.  I have 3 Main Lists, 12 supplemental lists, 15 minor lists and another 5 'misc' lists.

Books to Review

• Bought/Traded Books
• RR@H Books
• NOR Books
• BSCReview Books
• Sent by Publisher/Author/Publicist
• Book Tours
• ebooks

Arcs to Review

• Won from Contests
• For Author Interviews
• By Pub Date

Special Posts to Schedule

• Author Interviews/Guest Posts
• Coming Attraction Posts, Weekly Meme's, Monthly Posts

Minor Lists include--authors to contact, wishlist books, books to request, ebooks to request, giveaways, books to trade with friends, books to mention to friends, books to snark about, Sarcastic Sunday books to choose, Books with movies based upon, Graphic Novels, Comics, books reviewed, books to buy (that I own ARC's for) and books my sister wants to review/read.

Misc Lists are just the five major genres I separate my books I own but are older than a year to review into--Romance, Fantasy, Young Adult, Historical and Everything Else.  Each has a whole slew of sub-genres, but really that's how I basically divide my books up when listing them out.

I have specific forms for each list, that I print and fill out.  I update each monthly, but I only print new forms every three months (January, April, July, October) and I recycle bundles of forms each April and October.  Though I print off the forms for uniformity's sake, I prefer to write everything in long-hand.  If anyone cares to see the forms I can e-mail you the files for the forms.

I do all of that just for blogging. 

I list my books I own (read and unread a like) in the much simpler to use Books Database shareware from Hal SpaceJock Software.  I used to keep a banker book of all the books I own/read but because of trade-ins, donations, multiples, books lost and bought...it became too messy.  This is easier. 

My sister, who has far less books (she shares most of mine with me) of her own to organize and keep track of, I keep in a handwritten notepad.  She rarely trades in books or donates them, but then she only really collects 4 series--the Roswell books (yes the Roswell High and the ones based on the show), House of Night, Vampire Academy and the Gossip Girl books.  She has various others she buys, but often she'll grow bored and trade them within a week before I have a chance to update.  Though she wants to keep track of all the ones she has read, so I may just open her a Goodreads account and manage it for her.

I'm also in charge of my dad's collection of books, but that's on hold until he finishes his office.  Unrelated I keep track of the family DVD's, my brother's DVD's, my own and my dad's.  Collectively we own over 1000 DVD movies, shows and sets.

Reviewing

As I mentioned in the #bblog chat, I taught myself to really only need 4 hours of sleep a night (though I'll take more if I can afford more).  Often this means I am up to the wee hours of the morning reading. But I don't want to write the review just then, or I want to move onto the next book quickly.  In HS, since we often read books I detested and couldn't be bothered to remember anything about, I started keeping notes to help me remember important details for essays/tests/etc. 

I reclaimed this habit once I began blogging more seriously since I often had issue finding random moments I remembered I wanted to complain about or praise, or how to spell a name or some such thing.  Its all hand written.  This has resulted in a few banker boxes full of old notebooks--half used from classes mostly--getting a new lease on life.  I've reviewed over 400 books since August 2008--I've probably read at least 100 more that I didn't review for one reason or another, but they still got notes taken down just in case. 

To illustrate how in depth my notes are here's a few examples:
--Shadowed Summer, a book only 183 pages long I took 9 pages worth of notes
--The Iron Daughter, a book only 360 pages long I took 20 pages worth of notes

--The Way of Kings, a book 1008 pages long I took nearly fifty pages worth of notes

Some books I take much less notes on--usually straight romances will only garner 5 pages no matter the length, because they don't involve me remembering smaller details.  For series romances, like 'The Bridgertons' (8 books) or 'School for Heiresses' (6 books, 1 anthology, 1 short story) I had about 50 pages for the entire series length.  Mainly because I had to remember details of each couple and see how they related to each subsequent book.

Occasionally, if I am in a rush and need the book done now I won't take any notes.  Actually for e-books I very rarely take notes because I have such a hard time concentrating on the books to begin with (the exception being Christy Trujillo's two e-books Emmy's Heart and Emmy's Song, I kept notes on them both because I needed to remember details).

This is also why, in a lot of series' cases, I get annoyed when authors rehash every single event from the preceding novels.  Having just re-read my notes its annoying to then re-read it in book and have to leave the notation in my pad that says 'see notebook xx page xxx' or re-write it all again.

As you can imagine I have a lot of notebooks laying around, but in truth if I get rid of the book I toss out the notes.  If I trade the book I toss out the notes.  If its a solo novel and I wrote the review already, I toss out the notes.  I really only keep series notes and then when the series is completed I toss out the notes.  I will sometimes take specific quotes from those notes, transfer them to a different binder of notes, but I don't often keep the notes.

So I told you mine, you tell me yours.  How do you review your books?  Organize your blogging needs?  Are you a lister?  Do you just post whatever?  My blog doesn't have an exact structure, but I'm working on that so that going in my third year (my 2nd blog-o-versary is in October!) I can make this a more professional looking blog.