Time Since Last Post: 1 hour
Time This Week: 4 hours
I continue to suffer the imaginative ructions caused by my revelations on orbital mechanics and relict technologies. Lovely. This stuff is fun! And I am looking forward to starting a fresh draft in June or so - I still have to figure out some timelines and plot arcs before that, though.
On another subject, I have already posted this on Facebook but wanted to add some more commentary on an interesting process post from Antony Johnston. I quite like his process, if only because he seems to need as much review and rewriting of tasks and notes as I do. The thing is that he actually does it.
I recognised a long time ago that I need to rewrite todo lists (not, in fact, that I necessarily do so) but I had never really thought about how that applies to my writing. Having a notepad with me is also something that I have practiced pretty consistently for some years, but I have been keeping separate notepads for actions and ideas. The actions pad is a small disposable thing, the ideas notebooks have always been more impressive and durable items.
I have recently not been carrying an ideas pad, because I didn't use it. Why? Because I was constraining what I should write in it. A typical first page would be some note on how a particular kind of idea should go into it, or how only good handwriting or a fine pen should be used (a fine indicator of a historically poor hand right there). The primary lesson of NaNoWriMo is to not edit before writing. And I never reread things either: if I should have learned anything from Getting Things Done it's that review is the point. Without review things effectively haven't happened.
So, time to get back to having an ideas book to carry around and to actually write in it, but also time to implement a process for what happens to ideas once they're in the book.
As I say, this stuff is fun. Time to get back to having some of it.
Update - and Getting Things Written is really interesting too: ideas for making GTD work for writers (or at least for the writer Antony Johnston). Very striking, since he hits so many of the points that I have struggled with in making GTD work for me.
Posted by Dunx at April 2, 2010 10:38 AM