I'm done being on break after finishing off the Temple of the Seducer books, so I'm taking a couple of days to try and get my writing process in order before I move on to the next round of books. My process up until now has been:
1. Pick something to write.
2. Jot down notes on what I need to do.
3. Faff about.
4. It's been a month.
5. Panic, go to 3.
6. How did this story get done?
7. Wait a few more months.
8. Edit.
It's... it's not a great process. -_-"
I managed to get my butt in gear for the Seducer books (woo *confetti* woo), but now that I'm done with them I'm falling back into old bad habits I need to break.
The biggest one is that I'm super bad at making myself write when I've only got a few minutes to work in. I tend to write only after giving my brain a solid 30 minutes to an hour to sink into what I call... nothing... the point is I dawdle and then I don't get anything written.
So I'm going to follow some excellent advice I've read repeatedly and never quite properly followed! And that's to get everything down that I need to do, in advance, so when I have time to do it I can jump write in without sitting in the grip of a paralyzing fear of whitespace for two hours. And then maybe I can start setting up some deadlines and stick to them. Miracles happen!
Enter the PMP class I'm taking later this month...
If you've never dealt with Microsoft Project it's a God-awful piece of shit software program you should avoid at all costs unless someone's paying you to use it, in which case it's the super-useful industry standard. (Damn it Microsoft.) My day job is paying me to take a class on project management so I'm familiar with the basics, but I wouldn't dare use Project to try and manage my writing.
I decided to give Trello a try because it's free and it works on all my bits and bobs. I started off by making some to-do lists, found the interface acceptable, and started loading up book projects.
First step was to make a template project I could copy easily for new books. Trello sorts itself into "boards", so each project (book) is a board. Here's a screen cap of my first attempt:
Seems pretty reasonable at first glance (the color looks better live, I promise), so I copied the board and entered the info I had already for my "next" project ("next" implying I don't randomly shift focus):
Already I can see some problems. I'm going to need a reference list to keep track of any info I need that isn't tied to a scene or a task. Also I should have somewhere to put tasks I'm done with. But that ends up being a lot of lists, so I decide to use Trello's label feature to mark the difference between scenes and tasks so I can pick them out at a glance.
Now the project template looks like this:
Better! Now I don't have to break my neck browsing lists, and I can move the cards around to sort stuff that's important to the top. I'm keeping the drafted list because otherwise I'm going to have a lot of stuff lingering in to-do, but I might change that to labels a la Scrivener.
(Why am I not working in Scrivener? Because I've tried that repeatedly and it always goes fiddly on me and ends in tears. I'm resolved this time to keep the writing bit separate from the project management bit, and see if I have better luck. But for what it's worth, Scrivener does support the gist of what I'm doing natively so you're welcome to try it there.)
Now my next step is going to be getting all my current book projects listed out, then make boards for the ones I'm planning to work on, get the steps together... and get writing! As long as I can get an hour to work on it tomorrow I think I'll be fine. Plan on seeing an update by Friday this week.
-Lea
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