Friday Forays In Fiction: NaNo Project Status

I described my plans for this year's NaNo project in this Friday Forays in Fiction post a couple weeks ago so I'm not going to reiterate any of it here. I'm going to let the screen shots above do most of my explaining for me. They show my favorite application for all manipulation of text up to the point a formal precisely formatted hard copy would be needed at which time it is easy to export the text to a word processor.

The ap is WhizFolder and I use it for note taking and organizing, WIP, collecting active links to the web or any file on my computer including between WhizFolders and between topics inside WhizFolders.

You may have to open the images in separate windows or tabs to see some of what I describe here. The top picture shows two WhizFolders, one atop the other and to the side. The one to the left is STORY GARDEN and is where I collect story ideas and story theory. The story ideas I call STORYSEEDS which has a topic window near the top of the list on the left. When I get an idea for a story, I create a child topic under that and jot notes on the idea or even write a scene or character sketch. When the storyseed outgrows a single topic window I may give it a few child topics but before it grows by much I give it its own WhizFolder and it graduates to Work In Progress aka WIP. The WIP topic window contains active links to those WhizFolders. You can glimpse the first letters of these links next to the edge of the second WhizFolder to the right which is for MOBILE HOPES my NaNo Novel in Waiting.

The rest of STORY GARDEN is devoted to collecting notes from readings on and off line on all aspects of story writing including the writing life itself but with much emphasis on the rhetoric of fictionwriting. Another WhizFolder related to this one is the one I call my Reading Journal where I collect my impressions of my current reading and reading lists of various themes. There is yet another WhizFolder for Book Reviews. All of my reading whether fiction or non-fiction relates in one way or another to my own story writing whether I intend it to at the moment I select it or not. At some point unremarked at the time--probably in the late eighties--I reached a point where I began to read as a writer.

The second screen shot is of the full editor window with one of the topics from Mobel Hopes open in it. I used the full editor whenever doing sustained writing. I use the quick editor, shown in the top screenshot, for jotting a line or two or inserting a quick link.

Tomorrow as I read short stories for the Read-a-thon, I'll be using these two WhizFolders along with Reading Journal to take notes that relate to my dual project of a formal study of the short story form and preping for NaNo which is going to be a month long intensive practice in short story writing. Yes, I know the No in NaNoWriMo stands for Novel. Mobile Hopes will be a novel comprised of a dozen or more short stories all set in the same trailer park. Besides the characters themselves weaving in and out of each other's stories, there will be the common themes of hope and community weaving the stories into something like a novel. I hope to organize the stories at some later date in such a way as to create an overarching plot but I'm not going to fret about that until after NaNo is over and especially not before I've created a minimum of six families and their stories.

Arrrrrrrrrrrgh! My alarm is going off in THREE hours!!!! So much for my hopes of making it through the full 24hours of the Read-a-thon.