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the to-do list goes ever on
I opened up Workflowy and Skedpal on Sunday and discovered, to my horror, that I hadn’t logged into Workflowy since FEBRUARY. That’s how far behind I am.
The good news was most of the February stuff was done…? :}
Anyway, I basically spent Monday afternoon doing triage and figuring out what needed to be done and when and trying to lay out a vaguely realistic schedule for the next couple months. Of course, some of the realism of it requires me getting up to work at 6am, and so far this week I haven’t, so that may require some re-thinking, but basically I’ve got five projects on the ball and there’s a lot of juggling going on, to mix my metaphors.
I got a *lot* of the administrative side of things done over the past two days, though, and I’ll do more tomorrow, which will put me quite close to wrapping two of those five projects up. That said, because of the work-then-wait aspects of both of them, neither is likely to be done before the end of June, or pretty near to it, anyway. Still, it puts them MUCH CLOSER to done, and that’s a big and wonderful deal right now.
Oh, she said in surprise, going over her schedule, it looks like I was really wise and actually only scheduled FOUR things to deal with over the next two months. That was clever. So once these administrative aspects are dealt with (aspects which I am now eager to finish tomorrow, if I can!), I’m home free for writing a synopsis and then putting together a book proposal. Ah, excellent, what a wise and clever Kit I am.
(Nevermind the huge looming pile of things to do when these ones are handled. We are taking this One Bird At A Time Comma Dammit.)
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nibbled to death by ducks
I’m being nibbled to death by ducks. Or perhaps I am a duck, nibbling things to death. Either way I have accomplished many many small important things that probably add up to a lot but somehow don’t *seem* to.
…no, actually, having gotten the Old Races short story project kinda off the ground I suddenly feel like I *have* accomplished things. Yay!
I gotta finish up with MAGIC AND MANNERS next. The heavy lifting is done on the revisions for it, but I need to add a couple of small scenes and maybe refine another few things. If I can get that out the door by Friday I will be very happy. Wish me luck!
– email book layout person
– mail french books
– mail hqn stuff
– dig out story for patreon ppl
– mail stone’s throe
–email agent -
work that isn’t writing
I cannot believe it’s the end of August. This summer has been a loss to a much greater degree than expected, and I’m just sort of…I’m getting my feet back under me, at this point. And I *am* getting my feet back under me: I’ve actually accomplished a great deal of detail work over the past week, all of which was very necessary and is something of a weight off my shoulders.
Today is the first day of school:
which means I have about 8 weeks of 15-20 hours of time back to myself before the first term break, and in that time I…should theoretically be able to get quite a lot done. I’m not even going to make a list of what that all should be, not here, not today, not when I have a bunch of other piecemeal bits to still get done, but…the ball is rolling a little, maybe. I just hope it’s not up hill. :)
moving thinks to do up so i can see ’em again
– clear out inbox, augh (642530241144)
– dig out that extra story for patreon patrons this month
– pay credit card bills
–print things from ian
–finish paperwork for ian
–print things from hqn -
whew!
Turned out the Morganville Vampires books reached the end of a story arc with book 6, so I didn’t have to read 15 books this weekend. :) Whew!
Seriously, though, the books are a lot of fun, and if you haven’t read them, I feel you ought to go right ahead and get books 1-6 so you can gulp down the first story arc all at once. I’m gonna have to check with Rachel to find out where the next story arc ends or to see if I have to block out a whole weekend to read the other 9 at once. :)
I wasn’t in a mental space to work on my revisions yesterday so I started converting the ElectriCity script to Scrivener. With books that’s pretty trivial, but this is requiring retyping it all. That’s not a bad thing; I’m doing some editing as a result, and I gotta say there are some pretty funny bits in the script. I mean, like, in the panel descriptions. At least the artist should have fun reading it. :)
I’m not actually overwhelmingly impressed with Scrivener’s comics app. Its primary problem is that for some reason when the pop-up window giving you dialog/panel/etc options appears, it doesn’t respond to a tab selection, which means there’s more mousing than is comfortable. I’m looking forward to the eventual release of ComiXwriter, which I backed on Kickstarter, and, er, which I hope will convert the Scrivener file nicely because it’d be a pain in the ass to have to retype this all *again*. :)
I am determined to get this script done before DICE at the end of September. Actually, of course, I’d LIKE to have it done and get the Kickstarter campaign running by then, but that may be outside of my control. But the fact that DICE is coming up again and I haven’t gotten anything new done on the comics front makes me feel like a fraud for even going to the con, so I gotta do something.
(*mutter* What I also need to do is that 8 page Chance-universe script, too, and give it to Val so we can do a little web comic with it, since he was up for it. Or he was like TWO YEARS AGO when I last talked to him about it. @.@)
Harry Connolly keeps mentioning Scrivener features his Mac version has that my Windows version doesn’t. AWESOME features. I’m over on Twitter flinging myself on their mercy right now, because I can’t justify buying a Mac for half a dozen writing app features. :)
(…no. no i can’t. I CAN’T DAMMIT.)
Um, hm. One other thing I’d been going to mention, what was it. Oh! Through a fortutious combination of kindly mother-in-law and friend-in-need, I have scored an _entire day_ of writing on Tuesday. If I have any sense at all I will spend it making headway on revisions, but the idea of whipping out the manuscript for my nephew’s next book and doing a grand-slam 9 or 10K on it sounds like so much more fun. :)
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Scrivener
When I first encountered Scrivener I thought, “Wow, this is a really great way to spend a huge amount of time doing work that isn’t writing.”
I still think it’s that, but I’m coming around to seeing how it’s also got the potential to be an incredibly useful tool. I’m working on a couple of projects where I need to be able to keep track of a lot of names and relationships, and my general method (methos) of doing that is by keeping document files with random information inserted into them, and naming them things like “Jo’s history” in which I also put, say, Morrison’s background, thus making it very difficult to find Morrison’s background later.
Scrivener’s format lends itself to keeping those kinds of notes in a file at the side of the page, allowing them to all be available at a click. Same with the synopsis; it’s in the same file, so it’s just a matter of switching over to it (though I’m so used to alt-tab to look at different pages I keep alt-tabbing myself out of Scrivener). All by itself those things are incredibly helpful (except the alt-tab problem), and there’s obviously a great deal more functionality that I don’t know how to use yet.
I clearly need a Matrix-style “I know kung fu” download, although there’s apparently an excellent Scrivener how-to by Gwen Hernandez, who *also* knows kung fu, so that’s almost the same thing. :)
Anyway, I started the one project for which Scrivener was obviously suited in it, but am slightly surprised to find myself setting a second proposal up in it too. Apparently I’m becoming a convert. Probably not enough of one to move the longer works in progress into it, but possibly enough to move MAGIC & MANNERS in so I can keep track of names…
