Craft of Writing: Organize it ALL! (Part 2)

Hi there, everybody!

I said that I was going to share with you some pages that I have put together for my own bullet journal like notebook. I do not have those pages ready to share yet. The reason is because I am having a rather difficult time winnowing down just what I am going to put on these pages. Having a creative mind is awesome, because you can come up with tons of great ideas. Having a creative mind is difficult, because you can come up with tons of great ideas. It is hard to pick what to focus on.

All of that said, I have decided on a few things. First is that I am going to keep my editing work separate from my organization work. This may sound a little silly considering how other people have organized their stuff. I, however, recognize that I need to keep my editing such that it is more portable than my organizing work. I have a nifty little red steno pad that I use. Each manuscript gets its own tab divider and then I go through and write down all my line edits with page and line number. As I make the changes, I check them off. It is a terribly dull system, but it works well for me.

Secondly, I am going to have all of my language developing notes in their own notebook. That one is something I'm still in the process of dividing up into sections. The wild idea that I should develop languages is something that came to me back when I wrote the very first rough draft of book one. (That would be way back in 6th grade. It was two pages. I still have it. It looks nothing like the final version. I still take it out and look at it from time to time though. Just to remind myself how far I have come.) Scattered through my various notebooks are bits and pieces of this language development stuff I have done. This new notebook is going to be divided up by languages. It is also going to be where I do things like develop the different scripts for the written version of the languages. It is one of those notebooks with grid style pages in it. (If I had realized I could have gotten a composition notebook in this style, I suspect I would have had an easier time learning linear algebra.) This is something that I will be doing on my 'downtime' from other writing projects. It is a long term thing that I am not going to pressure myself to do all right now.

I am going to be setting up pages for plotting out blog posts separate from my novel writing work. This is for two different reasons. First, I have different things I am trying to do with this blog and what I am trying to do with my novels. I need these things separate so that I don't confuse the details. It is less a concern that I will be confusing you, gentle Reader, and more an attempt to keep myself from getting confused. Life is complicated enough with what I have going on right now. All of this organization effort is an attempt to make things less complicated.

It is my hope that next week, I will have the pages for novel development put together. And I think I am going to have my pages for blog post development taken care of by sometime Friday evening, barring any unpleasant surprises. (It is stuff that would have been done last week, except I had a child home sick with a norovirus. These things are horrid and I sincerely hope that you or your loved ones don't have to suffer them. Gastrointestinal misery is not anyone's idea of a good time.)