Over the past several months the writing bug has come back and I’ve been acting on it.  Right now, the fact that I’m staying at home cleaning and fixing up the place as actually helped.  When any kind of inspiration hits me it’s a lot easier to just put down what I’m doing (or finish it up) and grab a little bit of writing time.  I’ve had lots of mini ideas, but nothing really full blown.  Still, even when I used to write frequent that was true.  I have many many files of unfinished stories.  I go through them sometimes for inspiration.

About a month ago when Zombieland came out in the theaters we went to see it.  One of our friends had a Zombie novel with him and that gave me a chuckle.  I know there are a lot of horror themed novels out there – a great deal of them focus on vampires (most emasculated ones) and werewolves.  Then there’s all your other creepy horror.  I knew there were a couple novels that centered on zombies out there, but I didn’t realize that like the more popular vampires and werewolves it was becoming a genre in its own right.  Denise quipped that I should write a zombie novel as I am a huge fan of pretty much every zombie movie no matter how horrible it is.  I laughed.  Though over the next couple days the suggestion bounced around in my brain and I began to jot down a lot of notes.  It wasn’t long before a full fledged idea was in place.  Right before NaNo is to begin.  Sometimes these things just come together.

In a couple days NaNo will kick off and I think this time I have a good shot at hitting the 50,000 word mark – and quite likely beyond that.  I’d have to say that a full fledged novel in this genre will probably weigh in around the 80,000 word mark which is getting close to twice what you need to “win” NaNo.  It’s not inconceivable to manage this in a month.  It just means it’ll take even longer before I get around to finishing up cleaning the basement.  Of course this sounds like the proverbial win-win scenario to me.

The way to combat this is organization.  Simply sitting down and saying, I’m going to write something, is not a productive endeavor.  It leads to the rushed, forced feeling.  In the end it makes the writing feel almost like a chore.  I’ve always looked at various ways to become more organized, but generally never implemented much in the way of a system.  I never gave it enough time for that system to take hold and become so routine that it was just another of the many processes I go through on any given day.  Now, with a lot of time available to me, it seems to be the perfect opportunity to begin finding a system of organization, research, and writing that helps everything come together; something to make the process flow and seem more natural rather than a chore.  This search for a system is also a wonderful writing opportunity.

As I research and test out different ways in which to better organize my writing life (and perhaps other aspects of my life as well) I’ll share them here.  There are many methodologies, and each person has to find the one that works best for them, but perhaps for other people looking to get a better grasp on things some of what I chronicle might be a spring board to discovering your own method for gaining control of the spiraling chaos that life can sometimes become.

However I’ve started cleaning up a lot of my older stories – putting some polish on them, so that I can post them to this website.  Several are very short stories, others are incomplete, but maybe putting the polish on them, and putting them up here will help inspire more writing on my part.  I’m hoping the creative spirit is going to be a part of the new year, but we shall see.  In the meantime keep an eye out for those snippets sometime in the next couple of days. 

I don’t have any particular idea for what kind of novel I’m going to attempt – but I’m not going to even really contemplate that until November 1st.  I figure the best way of going about this is to just jump right in to the mix by writing whatever comes to mind at that particular moment and let my brain take me wherever it is that it wants to go.

50,000 words in 30 days, huh?  Break it down and that’s about 1667 words a day.  That’s a couple of single spaced sheets of paper.  I know I can do that.  In college I could rattle off a couple pages on just about anything in an hour or two.  I’m going to have to forget about the over all goal and break it down in to smaller objectives.  It’s an easier way to operate, breaking a big thing down in to smaller chunks.  If I manage to keep that pace up for the first couple weeks it just might give me that confidence boost needed to plow through to the end of the month.

There’s still a couple more weeks before it begins, so I’m not going to give it much thought until the thing kicks off on the first.

I had been pondering getting a PDA again, though I never used it as much as I should have – for whatever reason I just felt uncomfortable carrying one around so it was never with me when I needed to keep track of something. A few people have recently suggested I try using a Moleskine notebook. I looked at them a couple of times and they are very nice, so I made a mental note (ie, a bookmark in my browser) so that I might come back to that idea at a later date. Well yesterday I was reading some article on Lifehacker during a particularly slow moment at work and lo and behold they had a link to an article about converting a small Moleskine notebook in to your own custom day planner. This person actually made the decision to go from a PDA to a more simple approach to things and it inspired me. So last night I made a trip to Borders and ended up picking myself up a couple of the notebooks. One of the smaller ones (grid paper because they were out of the lined notebooks in that size) and one of the larger lined ones for jotting done story ideas, random observations, anything at all that might help the good ole’ creativity start flowing again.

I broke out the ruler and a drafting pen last night and started dividing the notebook, one week over two pages. Right now it only goes up until the end of June 2008, but I’ll add several more months to it. Then the last 60ish or so sheets will be used for todo lists, notes, etc. I bought some post-it note reinforced tabs so that I can divide the sections in the back accordingly.

Now I’m armed with my new lo-tech PDA and feeling ready to get something done! Or maybe just refill my coffee cup, it’s still early.