Writing is a newly acknowledged obsession in my life. Before I got my laptop, which makes it possible to organize my kookoo thought process, I wouldn’t have been able to finish a book. I NEVER said I wanted to be a writer when I was a kid and it was a complete surprise to me. I was generally a Jack-of-all-arts-and-crafts until I had too many kids to do most of them. The survivor of Kate’s Great Arts and Crafts Drought was the writing and it stuck. This is how I became a writer. It helps me to stay sane and distance myself for a time from the chaos. I have a love/hate relationship with each one of my ideas which helps me decide what to continue writing.
I wrote my Faq page and got a little nuts about how I write a story, but it got way too long so I summarized it there. This is the whole thing:
1. Ideas I have an idea and I NEED to write it down as soon as possible. They end up as several sentences to several paragraphs in my Microsoft One Note “Writing Ideas” tab. (I am in love with One Note.) I can’t really count all of these. It goes down somehow in whatever detail my inspiration can endure. In my basement are around 15 notebooks and journals with snippets of my writing. I use journals when I need the tactile sensation of writing, but they all get transcribed onto my laptop now so they are safe from houshold hazards (my kids). At one time many of these were used for bible study notes or as actual journals (haw haw).
2. Documents The ideas I love get attention and grow to several pages and more. They become a Word document. There are over 100. I switch around higgledy-piggledy as inspiration strikes, loving and hating them randomly. Some of these I still won’t even think of publishing for any number of reasons. I love to try to smash themt together to get a different story altogether. When I realized that I was a writer, I greedily searched for and gathered all of these snippets I could find all over my house and amassed them onto my computer. I felt like I was hoarding treasures (one man’s trash and all).
3.Developed Documents Ideas most interesting to me get further attention and get their own tab in my “Kate’s Stories” Notebook in One Note. Some of these also have a folder full of Word documents with revisions and re-writes. A few have several ideas that I mash together successfully to make a few stories. All of these, I plan to finish and publish. There are 12 right now. There is no rhyme or reason to this, just how I feel. When they reach several chapters with most of the story already planned out in my head, they get their own tab in Microsoft One Note. These guys are worthy of completion according to the Kate-o-meter. All of these have their own Word document and some have a folder. A few of my stories have been heavily revised or rewritten. Others are conglomerations of snippets that go well together and form their own story together.
4. Manuscripts Finally I choose a special one and write it from beginning to end (usually in the summer) and it gets combed over until I feel confident, then given to my “Think Tank”–friends who love reading who give me excellent feedback and some editing. I got the advice to do this from a website (http://jaynie2000.hubpages.com/hub/Publishing-Tips-for-First-Time-Authors) and it is A+ advice. Facebook polls gave me a lot of good feedback. Based on those, the votes of my Think Tank, and my own estimation of what is publication-worthy at the moment (which means I don’t hate it today), I choose one to work on. Last summer and this summer I “pounded out” the story, getting all the bones put together and making sure the whole tale is all written out. This is hard because I am fickle and frequently get disgusted with a story and want to delete the whole thing. I don’t, because I know it would make me sad later, but I still want to.
5. Published Book I haven’t reached this stage yet, but as soon as my editor is done and my cover artists have finished their work, I will! This step has taken longer than I estimated, but then again usually when you hand something over to others you need patience. I am also a disgustingly positive person, and so one week didn’t seem like an impossible time frame for them to finish. Oddly enough, I have a solid practical side that only chuckles at my positive side and how naive it was to think this wouldn’t take all summer. So I blog and dream of the day when my editing and my cover jpg shows up in my email inbox and I can PUBLISH!
I am fully aware that this is complete TMI but I don’t care. This is my blog :P.
Kate Policani 