Posts under ‘Organization’

[This was originally part of the mind-mapping post, but got too long. Then it was pre-empted by novel writing and talking about novel writing. One must have priorities.] One of the core principles of David Allen’s highly popular task management system Getting Things Done (fondly known as GTD to its devotees) is writing everything down [...]

Okay, I have a novel draft. So now what? (And thank you all for the congratulations – much appreciated!) Revisions, obviously, but it needs to sit for a while first. I envision it like bread dough: all the ingredients have been kneaded together, and it needs to rise for a while before I rework it, [...]

Highly useful things, brain dumps. If done in an organized fashion, of course. I started writing about the why of organization, but the post got far too long. So that will be tomorrow. Today is going to be about the how instead. One of my very favorite tools for organizing my thoughts is an Open [...]

This is how the New Year began. I hope it isn’t an omen And here’s how the old year went, or at least the SFF-related bits: According to my Goodreads list, I read 108 books in 2010 (not counting things read purely for work). Not bad. One of my goals for the year was to [...]

If it’s Thursday this must be… some hotel room. Last week was talking about science in Georgia, at my favorite annual science conference. This week is training sessions for field sampling. Once in a great while I get lucky and get to send a national crew out to do my work for me. Sort of: [...]

November is NaNoWriMo, and that’s a good thing. Taking up that challenge in 2005 was was got me back into writing fiction. But that level of intensity in November just isn’t possible for me most years. It’s no longer an incredibly busy time at work thanks to some agency-wide reorganization, but I’m still personally very [...]

Dear World, I haven’t written a word of fiction since the beginning of September. Lots of thinking about fiction, planning of fiction, research and note-taking, but the butt has not been in the chair. In my ideal world, I would be writing every day. But I don’t live in my ideal world, unfortunately, and I [...]

Dear Self, I know you’re excited, enthusiastic, a bit manic even. I understand that you want to drop everything to tackle this new project. I’m sure it’s the best idea ever, far exceeding sliced bread and possibly even better than the fresh garden salsa we made today. But Self, and I know you realize this [...]

I caught the first lines meme from Elizabeth Bear, and thought it would be a good impetus to locate and organize all of my works-in-progress. It took me a remarkably long time to find the 12,000 word novel fragment that I like but haven’t touched in three years. Obviously I need a better organizational system [...]

Every so often you run into a project that is just horrible, stressful all out of proportion to its actual importance (usually); something that must be done, but you just can’t do. Here’s my strategy for tacking intractable problems, for what it’s worth: 1. Get out a pen and paper. 2. Title at top: To-Do [...]