If you follow me on social media, you probably know how obsessed I’ve become with planners and planning. Indeed, some of you may have taken the course I offered at Savvy Authors. So naturally, when Alexandra Haughton mentioned this blog hop, I HAD to jump in. Seriously, what an excellent idea–a bunch of authors all sharing how they get organized! You can find all the different authors on the main hop page.
When I started out as a writer, I had a day job and I just wrote when the words came. I did trade shows as part of my day job, so I ran around a lot, which helped keep me from packing on too many pounds, even though the rest of my work life was pretty sedentary.
And then life changed, as it is wont to do. I gave up the trade show job for an office job. Better money, more security…less exercise. And I sold my first book, which meant I had to write more books. Under contracted deadlines. To contracted lengths. Oh, my. And I decided to self-publish some work. And volunteered to put a story in a charity anthology. And then volunteered to edit and organize another anthology.
I find it easiest to keep all my appointments on my iPhone, but I’ve always written my manuscripts mostly by hand, doing the first edit as the words go from notebooks to the computer, so it only made sense that once I started getting into using a paper planner I would become part of the #planneraddicts society. I have tried pretty much every planner system out there and the one that works for me is the Plum Paper Planner. My new one JUST started this month, so it’s looking rather barren. (Especially since it HADN’T started when I wrote this post in August, so I just stuck some stuff in so you could see how it WILL look.)
Here’s my Plum. Although it divides the day into Morning/Afternoon/Evening, I don’t split mine like that. I keep the earlier blocks for to-dos and appointments and the bottom box for long-term goals like writing and fitness. Next to each little typewriter is the number of words I’ve set as a goal for myself to write that day. The actual word count goes on the paper, and if I make my goal I get a pretty sticker or I decorate with colored markers. Likewise, I am doing PiYo to get myself moving again. So I have stickers to remind me which PiYo workout I am supposed to do each day.
This is what keeps me on track. Now, I do keep appointments in my phone’s calendar and I manage my boss’s Google calendar as part of my day job.Frankly, for appointments, I just find a gadget that will send you a reminder makes sense. But for long term tracking of what I have to do, when I have to do it, etc, I love paper. All the projects for the day job also go in the planner. Besides, all kinds of studies show that writing things down makes them stick in a way that putting things into digital media does not.
Maybe you’ve seen this GIF…I don’t know where it comes from, or I’d add attribution:
Since I really, really hate the “Panic” stage and I even more hate the “All the Work While Crying” stage, I give myself a certain number of words I need to do each day. But I have learned that I am not good at doing things “for me.” I have to do them for someone else. I will kill myself to be sure I don’t let someone else down. So what that means is that for my current project, I’ve hired an editor and have to have it to her October 16. It’s going to be single title length, so I’ve budgeted myself at 90k words. If I write a few more or a few less, that’s fine, but this is just to give me broad target to hit. My contemporaries used to come in at 65k, so it won’t be the same for every book.
I ONLY PLAN ONE WEEK AT A TIME. Seriously. I can’t stress this enough. If you have any kind of mood disorder, as so many of the writers I know do (my own are OCD and depression), it’s so, so easy to blame yourself when you don’t meet goals. So I try to keep my deadlines reasonable and pad them at the beginning. That way when I screw up, screw off, or otherwise miss a deadline, I can just add more words to the next week, or write on a couple of days I’ve given myself off. (And yes, I schedule days off.)
But there are also publicity and marketing deadlines to keep. So for every project, I have a “project sheet,” which was inspired by a number of my Twitter friends in response to my own desperation. It’s laid out in a way I can keep track of it (I think the wonderful Bree Bridges inspired the layout originally) and I can write notes in about what blogs I tried, whether there was reaction, what promotional stuff I did, etc. I laminate the project sheet, punch it to fit into my planner, pop it in the planner, and write on it with sharpies as I go along. I enter dates, comments, etc. (Here’s a nifty tip you may not know: If you write on a laminated sheet with a Sharpie and want to erase, go over it with a dry erase marker, then wipe off!)
I also have a couple of other recommendations for you folks who are trying to organize not just your own days, but your story’s days. Check out this post on Aeon Timelinefor tracking time in an individual book or in a series. My current manuscript tracks (*shudder*) nine generations of three intertwined families. Without Aeon, I’d be completely lost.
All the authors participating in the hop are giving away prize packs. There was so much great organizational stuff and so many gift cards and free books offered that the organizers had to divide them into six, that’s right, SIX, separate prizes! There’s a rafflecopter at the bottom of this post, so jump on in and enter!
Here’s my prize, which is only PART of ONE of the prizes! Washi, To-Do stickers, a pad, and an ARC of LOST. Enter at the bottom for this and a TON more stuff!
(One of the things I wanted to do this year was to keep in better touch with my pals who follow the blog. So I reached out over social media and asked whether anyone else wanted to get together and write up some blogging prompts that we could all share. We came up with a long list that I hope will allow me to chat with you all even when my own well is running a bit dry.)
One of the prompts contributors came up with was “For the Love of Poetry—share your favorite poets and poems.”
I’ll start with my smartass favorite, Dorothy Parker. Who doesn’t love Dorothy Parker, right? Especially since she wrote
Men don’t make passes
At girls who wear glasses.
I have a lot of favorite Parker poems, and I recite them at the drop of a hat (ask me at a conference sometime) but here’s one that’s less well known:
A dream lies dead here. May you softly go
Before this place, and turn away your eyes,
Nor seek to know the look of that which dies
Importuning Life for life. Walk not in woe,
But, for a little, let your step be slow.
And, of your mercy, be not sweetly wise
With words of hope and Spring and tenderer skies.
A dream lies dead; and this all mourners know:
Whenever one drifted petal leaves the tree-
Though white of bloom as it had been before
And proudly waitful of fecundity-
One little loveliness can be no more;
And so must Beauty bow her imperfect head
Because a dream has joined the wistful dead!
My other favorite is W.B. Yeats. Everyone knows The Second Coming:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
This poem has a special place in my heart, however, because of this song:
I also asked on Twitter for poetry recommendations, and I will be posting a list of the things I got one of these days soon.
One of the questions one of the prompts2015 contributors asked was: “If you could eliminate one thing from your To Do list without actually having to do it, what would it be? How would the task get accomplished?” That’s an easy one for me: Laundry.
Here’s my issue with laundry—you can’t ever get ahead. Even if you do it stark naked so that you can wash every item of clothing you own, you’re just breaking even.
When I lived in St. Louis, I went to a “Duds ‘n’ Suds,” a Laundromat that was also a bar. This is a great idea except that by the time your clothes are dry, you’ve lost any urge to fold, which means your clothes get shoved into the hamper and then you go home and pass out and wear them wrinkled.
Nowadays, I have my own washer and dryer, but I still hate folding. And putting away. Honestly, it’s easy enough to shove the clothes and linens in the washer and dryer, but then you have to deal with them.
As to how the task would get accomplished if I didn’t do it…well, once in a very long while my husband does the laundry. But if I had a lot of money, I’ve always wanted to have one of those services that washes and irons your linens. I adore the feeling of ironed sheets, but I am certainly not going to do that myself! Heck, I don’t even fold my fitted sheets. No matter how many videos I watch showing how to do it, they always end up like a ball. And they’re going to be stretched out on the bed anyway, right? RIGHT?
So, yeah, if I could afford it, I’d have someone else do my laundry. Preferably someone who came to the house so they could put everything away once it was clean and folded.
And just in case you didn’t realize that you could fold fitted sheets flat, I leave you with this video explaining how it’s done (in theory).
One of the things I wanted to do this year was to keep in better touch with my pals who follow the blog. So I reached out over social media and asked whether anyone else wanted to get together and write up some blogging prompts that we could all share. We came up with a long list that I hope will allow me to chat with you all even when my own well is running a bit dry.
One of the prompts was “do you journal” and I figured it would be a good place to start since I talked a while back about my planner.
I don’t journal in a formal way, though I have in the past. My most successful journals used tarot readings as prompts. But two weeks into 2015 I have found that I spend time with my planner every single day. I decorate it, fill it out, check things off, and generally review my day’s accomplishments and…lack thereof. I think about what I need to do the next day, or next few days, and try to keep my to-do lists up to date.
I have also found some friends on Twitter who are almost as planner-obsessed as I am. So we swap links to cool stuff for our planners, etc. It’s fun! And productive!
What about you? Do you journal? Use a planner? Do morning pages? Track your life in any way, shape or form?
(I hope to get a page up with all the folks who are doing #prompts2015, but I have to collect their blog addresses.)
If you follow me on social media, you probably know how obsessed I’ve become with planners and planning. Indeed, some of you may have taken the course I offered at Savvy Authors. So naturally, when Alexandra Haughton mentioned this blog hop, I HAD to jump in. Seriously, what an excellent idea–a bunch of authors all sharing how they get organized! You can find all the different authors on the main hop page.
