Blog

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Tools, Process and Organization, Oh My!

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Tools, Process and Organization, Oh My!

This post is not about the substance of writing. Rather, it is about how to stay sane while writing, not lose all your painstakingly-created work, and build an environment in which you can craft a coherent, complete story.

Everyone’s approach is different; this happens to be mine. You should use a process which works for you and complements your natural habits. But if you’re serious about embarking on any major project, you do need a process, an organization method and the tools to implement them.

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What Should Be the Foundation of a Story?

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What Should Be the Foundation of a Story?

It’s like the introduction to every “…For Dummies” guidebook: ‘So you want to write a novel—welcome to the club! Being an author must be an awesome job. I mean, you get to work whenever and wherever you want, and mostly you just travel around signing your books, right?’

If only! It’s not enough to just want to “be” a writer. For starters, you need to have a story you want to tell (hopefully more than one, but one is a fine place to begin). Excellent, you can do totally that—all you need to do is come up with a plot and you’ll be set.

Not exactly, it turns out.

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Why I'm Here

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Why I'm Here

When I was young, I wanted to be an astrophysicist. My eyes were fixed on the stars overhead and the future that was almost within reach.

Instead I became a corporate lawyer. Succeeded at that rather well, but found it a tad too much on the soul-sucking side of the equation. So I became a software developer. Succeeded at that reasonably well, but the best part about it was I discovered I could create things—things that didn't exist before I first imagined them, then made them.