Author Blog Challenge : Outlining my projects

DAY 7 Prompt: Describe your outline process for your book. What do you do to stay organized?

How do I outline a project?  Honestly I go back to the basic research paper style outline only I tend to center it on a page so I can make a ton of notes in the margins. 

I know when I get a real serious writing bug I tend to online my characters' stories individually and then combine those outlines with abbreviates for the various characters. 

Staying organized in the writing process is hard for me, I use Post-it Flags to mark chapters, issues, and other spots along the way. For projects that have only been online (here on the blog especially) I tend to use the blog labels.) When I print a project I try to put at least a partial copy in my accordion file and save a digital copy to a4GB USB Flash Drive thumb drive as well as an external hard drivePortable Hard Drive , of course several of my projects are old enough they live on a 3 1/4 floppy (am I dating myself with that admission?)

I have learned a hard lesson, don't depend on any one system to stay organized or keep your writing safe. Print copies can be lost, hard drives can crash , online locations can be hacked, etc... So I tend to keep copies in multiple locations and formats to try and keep my projects safe as well as organized in some fashion.

Author Blog Challenge Prompt #6

When did the idea for my first book come to me... that is actually pretty easy, although the book isn't finished my first novella idea stemmed from a One Act play I wrote my senior year of High School as part of my senior project for Theater.  Shortly after the production was complete I felt the script was incomplete somehow and realized it needed to tell a deeper story so I started playing with the story in college. I actually wrote the first two chapters as part of a Creative Writing : Advanced Fiction writing class my third term at the local community college.  I still have the peer review/ professor review copies of that project as well as several others I wrote for the class. While some of the criticism was harsh, it was honest and gave me some really sold things to work on. I have a working copy of that project in my purple accordion file that perhaps I will work on sooner rather than later. I think that was my first novel , however I have several journal and writer's notebooks full of story starts and ideas that go back as far as 8th grade, but my first real seriously focused project was Single Link from High School. 

A long Pause

Somehow June got away from me and I had to push the pause button on my creative writing. I had hoped to spend some quality time this past weekend writing/ blogging but alas that didn't happen.  I did manage to spend the other night going through an accordion file full of notes, story starts, forms (for character analysis and plot mapping). I found several story starts that are screaming to be explored, literally the file is sitting on the floor next to my bed and when I climb into bed I see the bright purple plastic and it seems to be screaming at me to pick it up and explore the trails that I started at various points in my life.  I also pulled together 3 different journals and managed to put the pages in chronological order and read through them, again there are several story trails I want to explore.  My fingers want to type stories or better yet scribble ideas and brainstorm fixes to the stories that are started and never finished. My head is filled with voices of these various characters wanted to visit with me and tell me their stories. I just need to find the balance to create more.  Hopefully I have found some glimpse of balance in today's cleaning activities; I managed to pull a CAT-6 cable from the router in my old office space (soon to be the 9 year old's bedroom) to the living room. This should solve 2 problems. First the need for a line for school activities in the living room (so I can have both boys in the same space while doing school work and not feel like I have to leave one totally unattended to run down the hall and help the other one); the second is the desire to have my laptop available for writing and not hide in the back of the house to write.
I need to talk to my husband again to see if we can come up with a balance, especially after the productive housework day the boys and I had.  Oh the stories I could write just from homeschooling 2 boys and living in a small rural community.  Here I go another tale stirring in my head.
I am going to try and do a daily prompt tomorrow but for today this is where I am and that is really all I can ask for.