I will still be building on the skills learned (and relearned) in lesson two as I work my way through lesson three and learn how to generate ideas while on a deadline. I remember doing this lesson, it was very fun and taught me a lot, so I can’t wait to dive back into it and work on getting some good ideas moving about that I will be able to work from.

My mom never faltered in her belief that I would be a published author. She believed strongly in my writing, encouraged me to follow my dreams. There were more than a few months over the past six years when the only way that we got from month to month was by the margin I added to the month’s income from my writing work. And this came to be enough for me. My mom felt that I had made it as a writer when my writing earned enough money to pay the bills.

Still, I wanted to be a published novelist and she encouraged me to reach for that star.

After she passed away, in late 2008, I let my dreams slowly get snuffed out under the pressure of others and other needs. I worked at writing, kept working to pay the bills, but the dream to be a published novelist was a lost dream for well over a year now.

I am no longer going to be afraid to pursue my dream, my mother’s dream. I am going back to the How to Think Sideways course that I was a part of when my mom passed away. The course that she encouraged me to take, and take it over from the beginning. As I work my way through that course I will use this website to track my progress and share my thoughts on writing.

I would like to offer the most heartfelt of thank yous to Holly Lisle, the course creator, for creating the course and for giving me a chance to return to it all these months later to work my way back through it and move toward my and my mother’s dream of me being a published writer.

Last night she tells me to be online on Saturday and ready to work on the novel. So, I promise I will wrap up my work and be ready to dedicate my brain to the task of the novel on Saturday.

Problem. I go to read over the notes we have and brain suddenly don’t wanna wait til she is here tomorrow, it has all kinds of thoughts on the subject *NOW* and I don’t has her here. :::pounds head on desk::: So, here I sit, writing away frantically with these ideas that sound GREAT to me, and at the same time wailing because I can’t get ahold of this gal I have nearly hourly contact with on any other day.

Co-writing can be sooooo stressful. :::sigh:::

So, I will just get all the muses out there, wrote down, and ready for her to look at when she is around to look at them. I just am so excited about the possibility a few might solve major plot issues we had going and I wanna know if she agrees. Arrrrgh!!!

I have about half the programs reloaded, but am hitting the annoying block of the new version of AIM won’t work with the comptuer.  I got an older version to work on it, so I will try agian to get the new one to work and if that fails I am just going to load the older version up and forget their new one.  They usually mess up their new versions anyway.  Last time they updated it I lost the ability to directly connect with my writing buddies, removing the ability to pass our novel-length writing back and fort, which made AIM all but useless to us.

Other than AIM I have my writing program back on the computer, still need to move the novel from the laptop back to the desktop though, and I have to get my image program (GIMP) back up and working on here.  I know there are more programs I need to get up and going, but I’ll be happy with them between now and the weekend – oh, and iTunes and Audacity, I need to catch up on the writing podcasts I have missed.

AirSet lets you create a group work area that includes a calendar that can be customized with features such as event reminders and a task list.  A blog administrator could set up a calendar that allows them to designate the theme for the blog for the upcoming week or month, then assign post topics which each of the members of the group can assume the responsibility of writing.

I’m just starting to explore the site, but from what I have seen so far, this is a great tool for anyone that has a multi-blogger blog.

And, just a quick reminder for my readers, the How to Think Sideways enrollment  is only open for a couple of more days, if you might be interested you really should get in by Sunday evening (the evening of the 7th), because enrollment closes early on the morning of the 8th and you will regret it if you don’t at least give this course a try.

PlotCraft is a simple program for tracking ideas that crop up for various plots. The program has a grouping feature that lets you sort ideas based on whatever grouping methods you prefer – you get to create your own headers for the groupings. I have created one that has my novel’s title and one that is a basic “short stories” group. Things can be further sorted by idea type, genera and sub-genera.

As I said, I am still learning how to use the program, but it looks like it is one that will be very useful once I get the hang of it. And you can’t beat the cost.

PlotCraft website

To download, click the “download” link in the middle of the first billeted list. I’ll post more about the program as I use it more and get an idea for how it works.

I’m in the process of organizing each chapter on 5×8 index cards and writing down the basic descriptive for each of the scenes in the chapters, that way I can flip through them and remind myself at a glance what was covered in each of the chapters.  I have also printed out the whole thing as it is so far – 55,000 + words and still lots of plot thread to cover.

I want to multitask today on working on that and getting my website for the novel updated with a new program I found that I like – <a href=”http://www.icyphoenix.com”>Icy Phoenix</a>.   It will let me create everything I think I have been wanting to include on that website, including a forum for people to talk about my writing.

Feel free to submit things of interest to writers, such as conference dates, writing competition deadlines, and anything else that might be of important to be on a calendar for freelance writers.  No SPAM please, I do reserve the right to edit, modify and remove any calendar entries that I chose without explanation.

Thank you