The Great Novelian Storage

I admire the writer who can store every plot/concept crumb into their mind-files and chuck them onto blank pages when they’re needed. Whatta beast!

I switch on and off into brainstorm mode throughout the day (like any writer), so I need to write ideas down instantly. If not, it’ll fly away or be crushed by another thought. Thoughts come at random times: class, the shower, the toilet, the middle of a conversation.

Last summer, I stored potential plot ideas for my work-in-progress in a cute Jordi Labanda journal (I was bombarded with plot snippets during work and scribbled away during lunch), and then typed this info into a file for later analysis. By summer’s end, I had forty pages of notes, names, and character sketches. Now … I’m organizing each idea into appropriate files, and each file into appropriate folders (characters, concepts, history, races, magic, etc.).  I’m nitpicky due to a fear of contradicting (or totally forgetting) an event or misnaming a character or location. To each his/her own, but it’s highly recommended for a writer—especially one who creates their own worlds—to write down any and everything. Beware the Uber Bionic Reader and their cyborgian eyes!

As many suggest, a writer should have multiple copies—journals, digital files (hard drives, USBs, online backups), and printouts of these digital files for safekeeping. (If you’re like me, you’d want to keep Murphy’s Law in mind. My junior year of high school, 40 pages of an old story vanished off my hard drive. I was wrecked, but later recovered my story from a website I had posted it on for friends to read). Shoeboxes—though cute and traditional–are probably not the best storage unit, since someone could easily chuck it into the garbage (my mom is a fine example of this. I’m sort of a packrat, and she’s Mr. Clean’s daughter. The contorted fantasy names would probably register as trash, hehe).  Journals are cool and more convenient than laptops, but digital copies of these are lifesavers just in case someone spills something nasty on your work. Typing your information also brings to memory and reinforces forgotten ideas.

And … digital files should be named with a clear, un-moronic name. (Once upon a time, I had a digital file for a story titled “Virus”. Yeah. My mom freaked out and deleted it. Haha!)

Now back to the organizing!

Alas! Summer Break.

And so it begins.

This year, I hope to get the most out of my summer [is excited]. This is, in fact, quite difficult right now, since I finished an especially tiring spring semester last Thursday and am trying to catch up on some much needed sleep (my bedtimes during school used to be at 3 am, so I gotta dust the circadian clock. Yeah …).

Let’s see what’s in RR’s cookbook this lovely summer. Hurrah-huzzah!:

• Summer Job: Worked all school year, but still need to keep it rolling. College = lotsa money. Lotsa money =/= RR.
• New college preparations: Lots of ends need to be tied in the quest of transferring.
• Sentinel of Mirrors: Planning to jump on a 1,000-2,000 words a day streak. Got 40 pages of worldbuilding from last summer. Looks delicious. Need to hit the iron. More on that later.
• Tempest and Marquess: Lots of worldbuilding. Need to hit the iron. More on that later.
• My personal summer reading list [is excited].
• Keep up with the programming.

Mission is go!