I’m home from Literary Love Savannah, and this time, I didn’t have an Evil Day Job to immediately get back to!
Instead, I spent yesterday luxuriating in some new stickers and creating my plan through July 31st. Give me a purple pen, sticky notes, washi, and stickers, and I’ll prepare for book world domination.
It’s ridiculous how excited I was to start my day yesterday — because of the stickers. I didn’t need an alarm. Once Honey Bun was up, I hopped out of bed and got busy printing my new pages for the rest of July. I’m using a combination of HB90 Daily pages (on the left) and Sarra’s Rough Draft Challenge notebook (on the right). I’m using it both to sketch out my day–and then also hold myself accountable with how I actually spent my time. When I got up. How long of a lunch break I took. When I got tired or distracted.
The RDC pages work best for a single story, and I’m concurrently working on several, so it’s not ideal. I may tweak this process for August, maybe even a separate RDC page for each book? Though that seems a little extreme, even for me. Especially since each book already has its own place in my bullet journals to record the sprint tallies, notes, and any journaling thoughts I want to capture.
Yes, bullet journalS, plural. Right now, I’m actively working in four different journals, and I’ve got at least two others started for different projects. I do combine ideas into journals once they get going, mixed with general brain dumps and actual journal pages. Once a series reaches a certain size, it really needs its own. The House Isador journal is almost completely full. I probably won’t even try re-copying all of the names and characters over to a new journal, but will keep the old one as the reference and add new pages in the second.
The Dynosauros world got its own journal with the completion of Monstrous Baby. And yeah, I started Monstrous Rampage today.
I’m also about 2/3 of the way through a short story for Guillaume in the Headless anthology.
I pulled out Blizzard Bound’s journal (combined with other stuff currently) and will prepare for a re-read and pick up that project again this week.
Once Guillaume’s story is done, I intend to re-read what I’ve got for Queen’s Purge, and maybe even Crusade, so it’s all fresh. Though I may also have to work on Helayna and Karmen’s stories concurrently once I get a bit further in Shara’s plot.
See why I need so many journals? I can’t keep it all in my head any more.
I’m also returning to my Kanban board for admin tasks, though it’s not fully set up yet. I used it to prepare for LLS and still have some outstanding tasks I need to wrap up now that I’m home. Like a retirement party! I’m planning to write in the morning and early afternoon, and then do admin tasks in the late afternoon before dinner. Molly and I still Zoom most weeknights too with a goal of two more evening sprints.
So I have no excuse for not getting a shit ton of stuff done this July.
Despite it only being the 16th, I’ve already written more this July than I did the entire month last year, even with taking last week off for LLS. July is historically a really hard month for me (so is August) but with enough stickers….
I can do anything.