Sunday, February 18, 2007
The other kind of organization plus Now vs. Now-Now
Today, after logging all my writing receipts, income and expenses for 2006 and getting everything read for my accountant (yay!!) I squished through Magellan's Witch for a while, feeling more and more like I should just go read a book by someone who doesn't have plotting issues. Instead, I decided I REALLY had to fix the structural issues that have cropped up. I hate when there are chapters that either don't have a home or possibly don't belong at all... Right now, MW is a big fat unfocused mess. I'm not panicking (much) because this
always happens. Several weeks from now, I will look back and think wow, this started out so completely different from where I am now. The now-now, though, is a mess.
So, I printed out all my pages, but in an 8pt font. Then I changed the sheets on my bed, got everything all neat and tidy there and laid out my chapters, one chapter per pile and started re-organizing the chapters. The piles were handy because I could pick them up and thumb through them to make sure I was right about remembering what else happened in the chapter.
(By the way, I hope it's evident to everyone that this whole process would have failed miserably without the clean sheets and tidy bed.)
With assists from the cats (who did not appreciate being moved from the bed) I got things in a better order, wrote some notes on some of the top pages to indicate things
this chapter gets deleted, but save the good bits for chapter x or
Add in the pills here etc. Next I got a big purple marker and wrote the new chapters numbers on the front. Why a purple marker? Because that's what was in my drawer, but it beats yellow. Looked pretty good, too. Then, I assembled the chapters in the new order and used them to re-order my WordPerfect chapters for real. After that, I conformed my outline. That left me with 3 outstanding issues, some of which arose because of the re-ordering. I worked out those issues while I was at a diner with my son and a friend of his. I gave them quarters and they went off to play arcade games, leaving me the table free for notebooking. Question, can I deduct $5.00 in quarters for peace and notebooking-quiet at a diner?
So, I'm going to see about trying to get the chapters in read-through order. There's no point in writing anything more until I know what I have on my hands.
Tomorrow is
Fix the Scandal Synopsis DayRight after this post, though, I'm going to post a rant. Stay tuned.
Labels: Magellan's Witch, organization, Scandal, writing
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