Happy IWSG day, everyone! October passed quicker than I thought it would, and I can’t believe we’re into holiday season. It’s getting chilly outside, and I’ve had to dig out my gigantic fleece squirrel hoodie once more.

Despite how dramatic the title to this post sounds, things aren’t as dire as they seem in the writing world. True, I’ve made no written progress toward book 1, but after a productive critique group night, one of my cohorts suggested to another member the book Story Genius, and I’ve decided to give it a look. I started in on the audiobook, and after a third of the way in, I decided, I should probably study a printed version and take notes. So I put in a request with the local library. Two weeks later, the library says the book is in transit. *sigh* That means I haven’t taken my notes on how to improve Derek’s journey in book 1 world. But, my sis-in-law helped me hammer out some plot things for Cameron, so that’s a win.

I’ve also figured out how to represent my sticky-note brain in a spreadsheet format, which I consider a HUGE deal. I’ve used soooooo many different whiteboarding apps, just searching for one that will work for my form of messy organization. Some shrink the text to unreadable levels to keep a consistent size for the notes. Some grow the notes and won’t let you keep a consistent size. Some are a pain to push to the background or bring forward, and others don’t have marker tools. After about a dozen sticky notes, I tend to abandon whatever program I’m trying out.

The nicest one so far has been Canva, but for some reason, it’s blocked at work, meaning I can’t even access it on my personal laptop on my lunch when using work WiFi, and my phone has terrible reception in the building so I can’t even use that as a hotspot. Therefore, Canva is out.

But so far, the spreadsheet system is working for me:

I need to be able to see the offset, alternating colors to align my thoughts properly. I also don’t like writing things out by hand (M.J. Fifield has some admirable sticky-note walls that I envy), and I like to have my info accessible both at work and at home. So far, though, the spreadsheet seems to work for me, so I’m rolling with it.

IWSG Question of the Month: What creative activity do you engage in when you’re not writing?

Well, if you’ve followed my blog for any amount of time, you probably know my answer to this one. If I’m not writing, I’m usually drawing. I actually just redid my map of the weekend, because I wanted to even up my provinces, adjust the location of the palaces, and make it digital friendly. The original was drawn in a sketchbook. This one was done on my laptop in Rebelle 7, which is a pretty cool application that mimics traditional media quite well.

I have another series of art I’ve been working on, but I want to finish the last piece before I post it all here. At my current rate, you should be able to see them next month.

How do you organize your thoughts? Do you use sticky notes? Do you like art?

About Insecure Writer’s Support Group

You can find the sign up for the IWSG here. We owe Alex J Cavanaugh a huge thank you for thinking this blog hop up.