Project management for writers: an experiment

Aside from being a total spreadsheet nerd (seriously - you should see my set of spreadsheets for 2012) I'm also a web designer by profession.

Actually, that's I was a web designer. I'm now a dairy farmer and proud of it.

As a web designer, though, I was exposed to a whole heap of ideas about project management and I always imagined that they needed to be applied to writing. Even though I'm comfortable writing first drafts without pre-plotting now, the project manager in me thinks there must be a better way than this profusion of notebooks, bits of paper and random text files for keeping track of what I'm doing. The spreadsheets go some of the way towards that (and I'll talk about them in another post), but what I keep wanting is a nice friendly-looking, simpler-to-use version of the project management software I used for web design projects.

Enter Collabtive.

The humble sidekick

This week for the WriYe blogging circle we're talking about sidekicks and I have no idea what to say, but I'm muddling my way through it anyway. Yep, best post introduction I've ever written.

Villains and Heroes

This week for the WriYe Blogging Circle we're all talking about our villains and heroes. I took several days to figure out what I wanted to say and it's still really just a vague idea, so here's hoping the post doesn't somehow head somewhere weird.

Like my previous post. I'm still torn over whether I think that was okay or cringe-worthy. Anyway, on with the post.

Inspiration v. Motivation

I sort of promised myself I'd post on Mondays, so at somewhere close to 1am on Tuesday I guess that means I'm a little late this week. I've been half-heartedly thinking about what to say all day and finally I came up with the topic of inspiration and motivation. People talk about this a lot, but it seems to me that they're always treated as the same thing. On the other hand, I tend to treat them as somewhat interchangeable.

WriYe Blogging Circle post 2: Naming Characters

Hot on the heels of my post on character depth comes one on character naming.

(I joined the circle late, so I'm a little behind and had to do two posts right away. My poor blog has not seen so much activity... well, ever. If the server crashes we'll just call it karma and hope it recovers quickly.)

So how do I name my characters?

WriYe blogging circle post 1: character depth

So, apparently the rest of the world is awaiting with breathless interest my response to the question: how do I give my characters depth?

First blog post of 2012!!!

Blogging is apparently not something that comes easily to me. All through last year I used the excuse that I was writing a million words for WriYe and blog posts didn't count, so I'd do one after I'd met my word count goal.

Yeah, that went well.

This year, I told myself, is going to be different. Two posts a week every month. So how did it get to the ninth without a single post?

Therefore, hello and welcome to the first post of 2012. No, make that the first of many posts of 2012.

Things I'm going to blog about in 2012:

• 2011. Last year I wrote 12 first drafts and a million words and told nobody about it. That achievement deserves at least a couple of blog entries
• My 2012 projects. This year I'm aiming for the only thing that could possibly be more awesome than a million words. What's that, you ask? Publication.
• Writing software. I've recently started trialling Liquid Story Binder, the first piece of writing software I've actually met that I didn't hate on sight. Whether this continues or not is still open to debate. I also like full screen text editors and I'm looking for an operating system that lets me have light text on a dark background system-wide. I'll give Windows 7 a chance, but I know Linux can do what I want, so we'll see...
• Writing. It wouldn't be much of a writing blog if I didn't talk about writing, would it? One of the big things here will be my 'seat of the pants' attitude and how it fares as I move into rewriting and editing. I've got some first drafts to do this year as well, though, so maybe we'll see the development of a detailed creative paradigm here.
• Books. Reviews, electronic v. paper, book-binding projects, book repair... I really don't know what, but I love books in all their forms and I really think everyone else should share my passion.
• Other stuff. Music, writing groups, writing months, random things about writing, cute pictures of my cats and goats (who are of course the most awesome cats and goats in the universe), and I guess the occasional link to something I think is awesome and needs to be shared.

So anyway, look! First blog post of 2012!