BD Wilson

I’m a pantser. I have tried outlines in the past, but it has never gone well, and I’ve always had more luck writing the first draft without them.

However, I’ve started using outlines for revision. It helps me figure out what scenes from the first draft aren’t needed, which ones are in the wrong places, and the balance of the events. When Scrivener for Windows introduced their beta, I found that the index card view organized things in a way that worked for me.

I’ve started using my iPad for brainstorming and plotting, however. Partly because it’s a new toy, and partly because I can think about the items and interact with them in a different way. When I decided I was going to use it for outlining, I went looking for the right app, and discovered the perfect one: Index Card (cost $4.99).

The app lets you create multiple different projects, and displays the cards as if they’re on a bulletin board. You can give them different colour labels and even write on the back (you have to open the card to flip it over). You can also drag and drop them in different places quickly, which makes it easy to reorganize events while you’re still trying to hammer them out.

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He sat in the courtroom and let the words blow over him. Doctors, lawyers, police officers (real ones, not a damn security force), all of them making arguments back about his future. It didn’t matter. He’d known his future, made his choice. It wasn’t his fault no one seemed to believe he was old enough to have done so. It would have saved time if they had.

But his lawyer wouldn’t hear of a guilty plea. Not for a pretty little blue-eyed blonde boy like him. It didn’t play well for the cameras. And there were a lot of cameras. They lined the back wall of the court room, at least the ones he could see. On the news the night before there had been footage shot from the front, and he couldn’t see any there.

The headline had been: 10 Year Old Matricide Headed for Death Row?

Apparently it was an important question. Which explained why it was taking so long to answer.

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I set goals this week! This is not entirely new, but I’ve decided to be a little more realistic about how I handle them. In the past when deciding to start a daily routine, I have also place a long length of time to maintain it. An entire year, for example. Given how I focus on numbers like that, it is hard to maintain motivation if I happen to miss a day for whatever reason. One miss and the habit is broken.

So I’ve decided to take it in smaller chunks, and track myself. My goal is to write every day, with an increasing daily word count. (I’m starting fairly low to get back into the swing of things and building it up.) But as part of this, I’m going to track my counts the way I do during NaNo. Well, almost the way I do during NaNo; I won’t be posting them

The secondary goal is to find out if there’s a pattern to days that I miss. My hope is that working the possibility in from the start will help carry me over any stumbles. If there is a pattern, then next month I can take that into account when I’m setting the next goal.

Ultimately, this is a Butt in Chair, Hands on Keyboard

Cara huddled behind the crumbled wall. There wasn’t much left. It looked like it might once have had a brick overlay, but the rust coloured pebbles could have just been part of the disintegrated spay stone that was all that was left. There wasn’t any sign of the frame that had been used to create the wall in the first place. Each time the wind blew more of it turned to dust and was carried over the dried field and other ruined structures.

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My holidays are over, alas. I did manage to focus enough to get some work done, even if I spent the first thing I did was move my furniture around. Unfortunately, the last thing I did was accept that I’ve been trying to write a fix for a problem in the narrative that actually needs to be fixed by removing large sections entirely. Joy.

I’m still going through what I have to see how much I can keep and revise to work with the new changes, which should be more than I originally thought. Right now though, the most I can saw I accomplished was progress.

I’ll take it ^_^

Someone was calling him. Liev couldn’t tell who it was through the high-pitched whine that surrounded everything. It wasn’t a fire alarm, didn’t rise and fall like sirens, couldn’t match the sheer annoyance of a public warning broadcast. He tried to cover his ears, but his hands wouldn’t move. They felt heavy, like the time Tomas had loaded all the weight bands on his wrists when he got too cocky during a workout.

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Situation
by Buck 65

Includes:

It was the sort of guest room that shouted how few guests the hosts had. Even if there had been blankets and sheets on the bed, it was an old metal frame that had been painted about three different colours if the peeling sections were showing all of them.
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