Recently I dusted off that notebook and revisited the idea of keeping a usable writer’s notebook. Having done NaNoWriMo for a decade and relearning how to do scene tracking helped spur this decision as I needed to figure out how to collect all the new data.

The first thing I did was to think about what I wanted to track and how much obsessive organization I wanted to dump into this thing. When I write by hand, I tend to write haphazardly and without rhyme or reason. I write longhand in short bursts of time because of the death grip I grip pens with (I am getting better— big barreled pens help). Therefore, realistically, I need a notebook that’s simple and flexible to manage both fiction and nonfiction works in progress (WIPs). I didn’t want to micromanage sections down to plot, theme, character, dialog, setting, because I’d never use it. So, this incarnation of my writer’s notebook had to follow the Keep It Simple, Stup!d method.

The new notebook, then, contains the following sections:

Submission Tracker. I wanted to keep a written list of current projects and their status of Draft, Revision, or Published. In the past I just listed the names and then a date of publication but I decided that this wasn’t really good book-keeping. So in the new book, I use a Cornell Note sheet and in the open left hand space, I list three boxes: D (for draft), R (for revision), and P (for published). Next to this, in the gridded box, I have the name of the project, and then I list the start date, any info on the publishing place, and when the item got published. I draw an X through each D/R/P box as the piece goes through my writing process.

Work In Progress. This section contains whatever notes and scenes I track on each current fiction or non-fiction piece. It also contains tarot readings done for characters and plot.

Freewriting. Occasionally I enjoy taking time to just write with a pen and see where the Muse takes me. This section contains those bits and pieces that may or may not end up being entered into Scrivener.

Quotes. I collect quotes and wanted a place to write or paste sections of prose that I enjoyed reading. I’ve got quotes from fiction titles, author interviews, and other various locations stored in here for my reading pleasure. Sometimes this reminds me why I’m in the writing biz altogether.

Blank papers. What’s a good notebook without a steady and handy supply of blank papers to jot things down. This section seems pretty self explanatory, really. I hope.

Pocket Folder. Trailing the blank papers, I have a pocket to stuff handouts, biz cards or materials that I’ve printed out and don’t want to manually bind into the circa notebook. I foresee items in the folder rotating in and out depending on what I’m working on and where I am at in my career.

And there you have it. This the new writer’s notebook, and amazingly I do use it and have been since I made it.

I originally wanted to post this recap of Saturday’s awesomeness on Saturday or Sunday but my brain was feeling a bit too fried. Doing it today also gave me the distance I needed for perspective. One of the fun events that our Vancouver region does during NaNoWriMo is to do an all day writing event. Known as Write in Motion, this year we wrote across the town at various spots.

To summarize the event, We had a blast! Our ML, nancy, and I discovered that together we wrote one half of a novel in just one day with our combined word counts! As you recall, Kender dared me to wrap up my novel Saturday. And I’m happy to report that I beat that challenge and wrote 13289 words.

Leg 1: 8:00-10:00 at di Tazza
Wrote 4684 words
Woke up bleary eyed and ready to write at the gawd awful early hours of the a.m. I ordered a apple turnover and a medium sized non-caffeinated hot chocolate and grabbed a spot. Others slowly started trickling in and soon we had a rousing group of about 10 people hammering away at their word count. My friend iScribe joined in on the fun and she also brought her viking hat of writingness. During this leg, I uncovered that I could write about 2500 words in an hour and that sugar is just as effective as caffeine for fuel.

Leg 2: 10:15-1:45 at the Cascade Park Community Library
Wrote 5364 words
Nine brave souls, caravanned to the library and felt the pressure of the parking lot of poor planning. We quickly rushed into our room and got all set up and quickly started writing again. Nancy led us through a short stint of wrist stretching (which I think helped my wrists from getting sore the entire day). This leg also contained a lunch break, some of us fell into some discussions about writing, using Scrivener, and other writing tips and tricks. Personally, I was shocked to see that, despite my “slight” lack of focus, I managed to somehow kick out almost 500 more words in this leg. Talk about the insanity.


Leg 3: 2:00-4:00 at Barnes & Noble
Wrote 3241 words
After lunch, we drove to the local Barnes and Noble, who had a circle of chairs ready for us in the back corner. Many from the last leg dropped out but we were joined by a few more writers. Our numbers totaled 9 again and we sat in silence as we typed. About an hour into this jaunt, I finished my novel, stretched, and wandered around the bookstore looking at all the various stories, hoping that one day my stories would also be found among the shelves.


Leg 4: 4:15–6:00 at Three Creeks Community Library

Spent this leg decompressing from having my brain explode from writing so many words. I did work on a bit of tarot group homework so I did get some writing. I also tried to fight of the sadness that usually comes from having spent intense time in a world or a story and then having to close the back cover on it so quickly. I will return back to the SGI world, once it has had some time to sit and stew and is ready for revision.

Leg 5: 6:15-8:15 at Van Mall Round Table
The final leg was more of a wrap up and party than an actual write-in, even though two intrepid authors kept working Had some more zany fun here with the 6 remaining authors, I even invited Kender to join us. We were all highly amused at the “WRIGHT BOOK” sign on our door. Guess they didn’t realize we were writing books, right? Hee. Ahem, in any case, we tallied up the total words, played the NaNoLand game and ate pizza.

All in all it was a wonderful experience, filled with frantic typing and great camaraderie. I have forgotten how much I do enjoy writing with other authors and I really should plan to make some more writing dates with my peers soon. Oh and while I may be done with my 2010 nano novel, I still have plenty of words that need to be written elsewhere, namely my blogs, the first draft of my tarot book, and crocheting a bunch of items requested by various peoples.

I’ve done it! I’m now on the backside of 50k words. I’m not sure if it’s all downhill from here but it does feel good. Julien has returned to the Earthborn plane and has been mirroring Tracy around. He’s trying to get a feel for what is going on and observing her activities throughout the day. He has yet to contact her directly through dreams but that will come soon enough. I did get Julien in trouble by first attempting to shift Tracy’s aura so that it’s more relaxed. Then I had him use her computer to try and uncover what happened after he died. As there was no info on it, he got frustrated and acted out. Which drew attention from those in the house. Julien has fled back to SGI HQ and tomorrow we’ll see what that does for him.

Amazingly kender (the world’s best nano cheerleader) put today into perspective for me. I told him that I felt like I was slowing down because it took me 4 hours to write the goal when it took a mere hour to do it a week ago. He said:

It’s natural to slow down. At the beginning of the book, you don’t have to worry about consistency. So you can just fly along. And as you go, you need to keep track of more stuff.

Which is so true, and I’m a bit amazed that I didn’t think about it. He also recommended that instead of writing everything in one shot, like I have been doing, to break it down into two 1500 sets. That if I do that, it may help me continue to write.

ETA: okay, so kender kicked my butt in gear and told me to write more. So I did. I am now on track to finishing this draft on Saturday when I do the Vancouver Region’s Write in Motion. I’m planning on writing 10k words that day throughout the day. Let’s see if I can do it and finish the novel.

Hooboy. What a weekend. I didn’t post anything mainly because I was busy with a Tarot Intensive that my friend Katrina Wynne was putting on. Pretty much ate most of my waking time over the weekend. But I did manage to write just above the normal daily word count all three days.

So what is going on? Well, I graduated Julien and introduced Tracy and her plight. What a plight she has going on. Things are just getting worse and worse for her and finally she called out to have help from “the powers that be.” Julien is now briefed on her case and he’ll be sent Earthbound to observe and see what he can do for her.

My goal is to try and keep writing 3000 words a day and to wrap this up by Thanksgiving. Then it’s time to switch gears and work on some other things that have been neglected.

Today was funky. I woke up late, and had to attend to Real Life things before I could actually properly sit down and focus on anything. I did manage to squeeze 250 words in before heading out, but it left me feeling off. When I got home, after doing errands and visiting a friend (and getting food into my belly), I sat down to hammer out 2000 words. And as you can see… I completely wiped it off the map. Go Team inno!

Had some of the hardest writing to do today. I had to talk a bit about the training that goes on inside SGI, Inc and present some of the classes, rituals, and characters that one can find there. Spent most of the time writing a ritual and quickly ran over the other items of interest.

Since tomorrow I start a 3-day tarot intensive, I’m not sure how much writering I’ll get done, so I’m planning on squeaking in at least the daily tallies. For those of you who aren’t in the know… a minimum day of writing on NaNo is 1667 words. If you do that every day, you hit the target amount of 50k. This year, I’m hoping to go a bit over this.

Today I took the plunge and badly wrote a car race and wreck for my MC Julien. Basically, the goal was to kill him off so the real story starts. A friend of mine remarked about why I did two days of “prewriting”, and I basically told her that I wanted to have a pre-living and death scene in the story so that the reader has a small chance to connect to the MC. This way we can watch him develop from a jock teen to a spirit guide in training. Tomorrow the fun part starts as I get to figure out the ins and outs of SGI, Inc and introduce both Julien and the readers to this new world I’m trying to create.

Most of the word count was achieved while doing a small 15 minute word war with my friend Lyndsey. It really helped me focus and hone in the time to write. And it gave me a reason to ignore the IMs popping up on my screen. Word count achieved, I rewarded myself with a sushi treat from Freddy’s and a Lavender soda.

Spent most of last night worrying about today’s writing and the rest of the week. I’m going to be out and about Friday through Sunday at a second Tarot Intensive in Portland. I know I’ll get it all done but I worry about how much writing I’ll get done in between the hours I’ll be gone and sleep and exercise. Ah… who am I kidding, this is nano. Sleep is for the weak. *gryn*

In 2008, while I went crazy and wrote a novel in a month by hand, instead of posting the whole thing live, I wrote about my writing experiences. This was partially based off a fellow writer (and friend) Jamie Grove. I didn’t do this sort of coverage last year but due to the whole social network thing getting tied into the site and all, I think I’ll bring it back. Click the more button to read on!

So welcome to the first day of NaNoWriMo 2010! *insert clapping and cheering here* For me, the day began at precisely midnight:01 as I attended this year’s Midnight Write-in at a local Shari’s dive. By midnight, we had about 20 or so writers sitting around 10 tables waiting for the darkest hour of the night to arrive. Many of the new friends I made last year were here and we had a good time chatting, discussing the merits of Scrivener (who not only released a new version of the software for Mac today, but also have a beta out for Windows), and general writerly camaraderie.

The moment the clock struck twelve-oh-one, we were off like rabid rabbits eating everything in sight. I started my nano playlist and let that carry me to victory. Strangely, I was nervous before actually beginning to write but as I continued to hammer out the words, the only calm I experienced was that of my fingers moving really quickly across the keyboard. I wrote about the life of Julien, my MC, while he was still alive and in high school. I ended today’s word total with him speeding off in his new car to get ready for the race that will end his life.

I won the first Word Wars with something like 900+ words in 15 minutes (or was it a half hour, can’t recall) minutes. I then slammed through the rest of my remaining daily goal of 2500 to reach it in about an hour’s time. Wow. Talk about fast typing.

I’m feeling good. Spent most of today cleaning the house and getting ready to hand over those duties to Kender who’s been an awesome cheerleader so far. Also did a bit of prep research for tomorrow by trying to find out what muscle cars and or drag racing cars were popular during the 1960′s. Asked for kender’s opinion and he gave me a good idea that will pit the two cars I found against each other. In any case, I’m looking good for tomorrow.

In any case, as soon as I asked the question, “How did you get assigned to me?” the seed of a story idea flooded into my mind. I then said, “Never mind. I guess this sort of answers it.” And thus, Spirit Guides, Inc. My novel in-progress for 2010 was born.

Here’s the novel in a nutshell:

Where do our spirit guides come from? How are they assigned to people?

Welcome the world of Spirit Guides, Inc. (a clouded company) that handles spirit guide counseling between the spirits of our ancestors, animals, and other creatures, and their corporeal Earthbound companions.

This novel follows the adventures of Julien as he learns the ropes of becoming a licensed Spirit Guide. His first assignment, to protect Tracy Springer who’s soul is slowly being destroyed by a member of the rouge organization called The Shadow Group.

And here’s a glimpse of the banner I created for the novel to use on the NaNo forums.

Today I pulled out one of my writing notebooks and decided to put my own writing to the scene test. I broke open a new pack of Circa storyboarding sheets (sadly, Levenger does not make these anymore) and sat down to practice this process using the past four years worth of NaNo novels. I sat down with each novel’s plot outline and started unraveling the story into scenes.

For each storyboard bubble, I wrote down a location and then listed all the actions underneath. Here’s what I found out:

• In 2006, I had 11 scenes.
• In 2007, I had 11 scenes.
• In 2008, I had 8 scenes.
• In 2009, I had 12 scenes.

What does all this mean? Well, it means that I am well under the 20 scenes of a modern day script masterpiece. (However, the quality of my first draft prose is debatable). This gives me a bit of a new quantifiable way to break down my novels and story structures to see what is going on and perhaps give me some insight into fixing any issues when it comes to the revision process. And using storyboarding paper is fun, especially if you know how to draw and can create images to go along with the scenes. (Sadly, my bubbles have no pictures yet.)

I have not started a plot outline for this year’s NaNo novel entry. But now that I’m aware of the value of tracking scenes, I know that I’ll try and have no more than 12 scene changes in the whole book.

The big news? Well, I learned how to crochet a few months ago. There was a particular thing I wanted to learn how to make so two of my fiber friends muddled through and taught me how to do it. And the amazing thing is that it’s stuck. I’m making thing after thing after thing and actually enjoying it. So, go figure.

A few seconds ago, I was sitting here in the Comfy Chair ™ crocheting a project for a friend and I started thinking about a strange side-effect to crocheting. It’s helping me work things out with my writing in my head.

Spent most of this week working on sorting out thoughts for various reviews and instead of just sitting in front of an open Scrivener screen doing nothing, I pulled out one of my WIP projects and started going at it. That’s when the strange thing happened, I was focused on crocheting rows but my mind was actually rambling off good ideas and sentences. Every now and then I’d pause to jot the ideas down, then I’d go back to working on my row.

I’m a bit surprised at this discovery and look forward to seeing what other insights and effects crocheting has on my other lifetime passions.