Dear Internet,
It’s mid late Sunday afternoon and we’re still up at Throbbing Cabin. TheHusband and I are teaching ourselves how to relax and he’s doing a fine job of it at the moment if his snoring is any indication by cleaning the gutters and other yard work.
Me, on the other hand? I‘m actually working but it’s the kind of work I love to do so it is actually fun, not work. Following him around the perimeter of the cabin with the shop vac on my shoulder so he can suck up all of the last years worth of leaves from the gutters. And isn’t this what the whole adventure was to be about in the first place?
Fuck. I was tricked into doing yard work.
Moving on. I am not allowing myself feel guilty for not getting much writing work done my first official week into this new venture. Domesticity had to be done and so it was and now that I have a sort of rhythm going to my day and making heavy use of my calendar, I’m sort of figuring out what direction I’m going in.
That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. When I’m not being tricked into doing yard work, that is.
Today’s writing task was to sort through all of my scraps stored on Google Drive and Dropbox, consolidate them and remove the duplicates, then import non-journal based things into a Scrivener project I manage for such works I titled Story Ideas. Story Ideas is my launching pad for all of my fiction writing as any idea, line, scrap of something lands up here and organized into one of seven main sections, Book Ideas, Story Ideas, Stories in Progress, Outtakes, Research, Scrivener Projects (projects with their own Scrivener project file), and Completed.
Most of this is pretty self-explanatory except perhaps for Outtakes which is chunks of writing I’ve removed for whatever reason and did not want to trash and Research, which is links to things I want to dig into more but not sure what for just yet.
This task turned into the rabbit hole of all holes as I have folders inside of folders in various places across Dropbox and Google Drive. I’ve now made a ToDo item to dig more to figure out what each piece is (journal entry? prose? short story? something else entirely?) and sort it out later. Everything that could easily sorted today got moved into Scrivener to keep it all in one location.
Right now the stats are
- 46 story ideas (various states)
- 16 book ideas (mainly first few chapters, synopsis, and related material)
- 8 short stories in progress (most are near completion)
- 8 notes in Research
- 4 completed short stories
- 2 existing Scrivener projects
This does not include all the notes I’ve made in paper journals or index cards not yet transferred, notes made in SimpleMind for an Icelandic saga cycle I’m working on, or what other treasures are still lurking on my drives.
(If this all sounds impressive, it is and isn’t. I had no idea the sheer amount of prolificness BUT a lot of it is dreck. I’ve got NaNoWriMo projects dating back to 2001 (and novels started as far back as 1999) that are very clear indicators of what I was into at the time, which isn’t the same as I am into now. 95% of this will probably never see the light of day as it’s pretty bad, thank fuck.)
The big thing I need is accountability, because this current organization in its natural chaotic state is a hot mess.
At the beginning of the month I’ll put up my writing plan and at the end, summarize what I did. I’m not going to do word counts (yet) because I have no idea how to apply it realistically. From June 28th – July 5th, on the blog alone, I cranked out 9, 724 words over 13 blog posts. That’s not including work I’ve done on note taking, story editing, and anything else since I don’t have those numbers. So word counts are out (for now).
Additionally, TheHusband wants to see some kind of timeline of my work progress so he knows when he needs me to crack the whip or for me to calm the fuck down. All very civilized in our household.
Behold! Projects for July:
- Launch lisarabey.com finally
- Plow through current library loans and ARCs from NetGalley and get reviews written
- Collate notes on the Edwardian mystery, continue with research, and get most of the structure sorted
- Start fleshing out 45th parallel story
- Finish or shelve in-progress short stories and submit completed ones
- Get Vol 1 of secret Kindle project completed and online
- Continue note carding ideas / quotes / etc for future projects
Is this a lot? It feels like a lot but at the same time it feels like I’ve barely scratched the surface of what I feel what needs to be done.
When I check in 25 days, we’ll see how it went!
xoxo,
Lisa
This Day in Lisa-Universe: 2003