Exuse Me While I Go Play With My New Toy

A screenshot of WhizFolders Pro as I typically used it. Note all the different sized windows stacked and scattered across the screen.

I got a surprise in my inbox this evening.

I've blogged about my use of WhizFolders Pro for all note-taking and draft work many time over the last 2.5 years since I bought it and before that I blogged a number of times about the free version, WhizNotes, in which I did my NaNoWriMo draft several years running. The two latest posts about Whiz are here where I created and ebook and here showing how I used it during Bloggiesta.

Well recently Whiz generated an error report automatically which I agreed to send and a few hours ago I got a reply from AviTech, the creator of the ap, informing me that the bug had been addressed in the latest updates but that he noticed that my two years of free updates had expired last February but he was also aware that I had blogged about Whiz and because of that he was extending me a complimentary upgrade. Not only to the latest edition but to the Deluxe Edition which is a step up from Pro!

I was just sitting down to prepare Thursday's post and planning to work on a book review of The Girl with Glass Feet for Friday's post when this e-mail arrived. Ed was sitting beside me about to prepare for bed but when he saw that he was as excited as I was and he, (who is my tech go to guy) agreed to stay up long enough to walk me through download and installation of WhizFolders Deluxe.

Below are a few screenshots I took after the installation. With most of the same files open my desktop now has only two Whiz windows because Whiz now has tabbed view for the file windows as well as for the topics in the editor window. This is going to eliminate one of the minor hassles of loosing the smaller windows under the bigger ones and having to call up the master list of open windows to find it. Minor but annoying, so this is going to be nice.



Here the editor window is under the files window and the file selected is my Web Map which is my Web bookmarking file. The topic open is the one for reading & writing related blogs which I added dozens of links to during the Bloggiesta this past weekend. The reason I prefer to bookmark web pages this way is that I can drop comments with the URL that remind me of the relevance of the link to whichever interest or project.


Here I've selected the tab for my Reading Journal Whiz file. Note the colored topic titles in the list at the left. This feature was part of Pro and allows me to color code items. In this case these are the bibliography slips for library books and the colors indicate:

• green = currently checked out
• red = previously checked and begun but currently at the library
• teal = never checked out but confirmed the library possesses. You could call this a wishlist. I create these as I read reviews online that intrigue me.
• lavender = previously checked out and finished reading but not finished with book review
• white = read and review posted

Not visible above:

• purple = short story collections
• yellow = finished reading, still in my possession and available for review
• navy = books about writing
• maroon = books relevant to an ongoing research project related to my fiction WIP

Here the tabbed editor window (looking pretty much the same as before) is on top of the new tabbed file window showing the book review topic for The Girl with Glass feet. Note the ability to drop a thumb of the book cover. into the file. This is helpful to me as my memories are stored with associated images so being able to gaze at the cover helps me remember the experience of reading the book--the story, characters and plot as well as my thoughts and feelings at the time. This enables me to write a review after the book has gone back to the library.

Well, as you can imagine, I'm anxious to continue exploring the new features. Some would be new to Pro but many are for the Deluxe edition only and I'm eager to play with them.

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Time to Wrap Up. And I Don't Mean In a Tortilla.

I have easily put in 50 hours on blog improvement tasks since 8AM Friday morning. And that was after a good 20 hours of prep between the wee hours of Wednesday and the wee hours of Friday. I spent that prep time preparing a task list with every thing I could think of that needed doing. That list wasn't just for Bloggiesta weekend goals but for the long haul. I surprised myself by how long the list got and so quickly too. Apparently I'd been keeping that list in my head for months and years. Nothing on it was something I had never considered before I learned of the Bloggiesta Tuesday night.

Turns out keeping that list in my head instead of putting it in visible and manipulateable form had been a major cause of the sense of overwhelm I felt every time I began to think about beginning and improvement project. When I first started listing I typed as fast as I could taking no care to keep ideas in any order. I just got the tasks listed. Then after they started coming slower, I started moving items into related groups and after that I prioritized it and then I marked tasks that I felt I lacked knowledge or understanding to complete. That was the state it was in when I posted it.

Then during the weekend I continued to add to the original list and move things around, regroup them, clarify them etc. And all through the weekend I pasted links next to items on the list with resources specific to the task. I got those links while surfing participants blogs and following the links I found there whether in the Bloggiesta posts or in their older posts or in their sidebars.

One of the tasks on my list was to organize my note ap to make keeping track of all these tasks and the new info I anticipated accumulating. I didn't stop to organize it first though. I let the way the information came guide me into how best to store it. I've blogged many times before about WhizFolders Pro and the various ways I use it. It is an application for note taking that allows you to move blocks of info around inside the file using nested topics. It uses RTF and allows for object embedding, colored text and highlights, and live links both within the documents, among the Whiz files, to any ap, program or file on my computer and URLs. I use Whiz exclusively for all note taking, journaling and rough drafts and for creating e-books of public domain classics. I also use it for bookmarking the web, for creating task lists and organizing projects of all kinds.

Relevant to my current blog revamp project, because I am focused for now on the book blogging aspects, there are three main Whiz files I needed to tend to this weekend--Joystory, Reading Journal and Book Reviews. You can see portions of all three of them in the image below. In a few weeks I hope to put a similar focus on the creative writing aspects. At least by-the end of summer when it is time to start prepping for NaNoWriMo.



I can adjust the window sizes of each file so I can have portions of several visible at once when i wish to hop back forth or I can have any one file full screen like this:



There you see the section of the Joystory Whiz concerned with Reading Challenges. The two panes are also adjustable. There are nearly 200 topics in this file so that is not even ten percent of them showing there. The topic list on the left can be color coded and the ones marked in the royal blue there are the four challenges that I've already joined. The rest of them are lined up and ready for take-off. That was THE major project I accomplished on Saturday. Chasing down those challenges, collecting images, links and rules and making tentative book lists. All of that collected in the Joystory Whiz. The culmination of that project was to create the Reading Challenge Portal post which was Saturday's post and will be the portal to my status on the challenges.

In the Reading Journal Whiz I keep records of all my library due dates, bibliography slips for each item checked out, wish lists, recommended reading lists, quotes, reading notes, and because I check out so many from the library also DVD, which I may eventually move into their own Whiz. This file has nearly 600 topics and is growing by tens and twenties every week. Because I didn't start keeping my bib slip records this way until about a year ago, one of the projects I worked on this weekend was to get bib slip topics made for as many books which I finished in the year or two previous to last June that came to my mind, looking them up in the library card catalog and copy/pasting the bib info. Then I made a duplicate of the topic to put in the Book Review Whiz. One of the tasks I added to my comprehensive task list was to start making bib slips in this file for all the books I own.

The idea is that with those bib slip topics created and me using the file regularly I will keep seeing certain titles and be inspired to begin a review and said inspiration won't be dampened by not having a quick and easy place to dump info and musings and begin drafts. There are nearly 200 topics in Book Review Whiz and only a handful of those are child topics so that means there are nearly that many reviews. Some 20 have been posted already. The rest are in various stages from blank beneath title/author to awaiting final edit or a needed link or cover image..

One of the things I made a point of all weekend was to study the blogs I visited and to harvest things off them. I don't mean proprietary or copyrighted things. I mean I took notice of every banner, button, link, gadget, widget, promo etc, etc and if it looked like something I might want or I just wanted to look into in more depth later, I put the link in the appropriate topic in the appropriate Whiz and also the link to the page I had seen it on.

One thing I regret is not spending more time leaving comments and participating in the mini-challenges. I had intended to but as often happens with me, I got hyperfocused on one set of tasks and barely took time to sleep or eat until Sunday evening when we had company over and I couldn't (nor did I want to) stay holed up in my room.

One major task I had hoped to accomplish by Sunday evening was a template change to one with more than two columns. One task I did complete was to hunt down the perfect free template. One that can have up to 8 columns (with 3 in the footer). But I was too intimidated to make the transfer without help and Ed was supposed to help me Sunday afternoon but then we had the company and he discovered he had to leave for work at six this morning so the template change will have to wait a bit. But because I knew this template change was in the works I chose not to put too much effort into adding or subtracting or rearranging stuff on the current template. So there is little visible on the blog to show for all the work I've done besides the three (now four) posts themselves. (Yeah, yesterday's Sunday Serenity post, tho a bit of an aside, was relevant to the weekend's work)

I participated in one mini-challenge only, Write Your To Do List, at the 2010 Blog Improvement Challenge, which by the way I'll be going back to again and again as I continue to work chip away at my list. Here's hoping I can start marking things as done faster than I add to things to it pretty soon. There were other accomplishments for the project I meant to give a mention here but I'm starting to fade which means I'm probably boring the sombreros off anyone who even managed to read this far.

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My Proust Boost

Last night after posting my announcement about entering the Gilmore Girls Reading Challenge I intended to spend the next several hours reading. But first I took a moment to glance through the GG reading list which I have transferred into my WhizFolder ap and then gone through it title by title, changing the font color on those I have read to blue and those I haven't but intend to read to red.

As I scrolled down the list, my eyes fell on Proust's Swann's Way which triggered a string of memories. First of the Gilmore Girls episodes in which Lorelei was dating Rory's teacher, Max who loaned her his copy of Swann's Way. That beautiful dark blue (leather?) with silver embossed designs on the cover and spine had me nearly drooling every time I saw the scenes it appeared in.

And invariably seeing those scenes or remembering them will trigger memories of the copy of Remembrance of Things Past that I once owned. It wasn't as fancy as Max's but it was nicer than most of the books I ever owned. It contained the whole 7 volume Proust novel in one hard covered book that had slate blue cloth boards with a cream spine with the title and author gold embossed on the spine. Instead of a dust jacket to protect it, it had a slate-blue cardboard box which it slid into. It's pages were rough-cut on the edge opposite the spine and very thin. It had a slate-blue ribbon bookmark attached.

I'd acquired it in a used book store on the Oregon coast in the early 90s for around $8. When I was forced to sell it in 2001 I believe I was given between $10 and $15 for it and a few days later while walking past the Santa Clara, California bookstore I'd sold it to I saw it displayed front and center in the window with a hand-printed sticker I couldn't quite read that was either $30, $50, or $80. My heart sank as my slim hope of buying it back if our luck changed soon enough slipped away. Even at $30 I couldn't have justified it unless we won a mega lottery or the company that had just laid Ed off were to suddenly go public and turn his accumulation of stock options into our docking ship.

Obviously neither of those things happened.

Funny thing is. I'd never done much with the book while I owned it but dip into it at random while handling it with awe, reading a paragraph or a page or even just a sentence. I kept intending to settle in and read it but it wasn't a library book and thus had a hard time competing with those tyrannical due dates.

The memory of that book always carries a weight of regret.

So with all those memories and feelings coursing through me, I decided to find out how much it would cost me to replace the book. Not the exact edition. A paperback or two, or seven maybe. My research taught me that the cheapest option would be a two volume paperback costing around $25 total. Getting the seven volumes individually as paperback would cost between $40 and $80 as they averaged $8-11 apiece. But I couldn't really imagine ordering anything without seeing more than an image of the cover. I really didn't want to get mismatched editions. Plus I really needed to see the font to be sure I would even be able to read it.

Then I thought, what about an ebook. And was about to check the usual sources for the cost when I stopped to think that most if not all of the volumes should be in the public domain by now and I headed to Wikipedia to confirm my memory of the dates and in that article I found the link to Adelaide University which offers all seven volumes three ways: read on line, print or ebook download.

I was going to go with the ebook download but I was unsure of the file format and which ap I would be using to read it with. I'm not all that fond of reading pdf files. I prefer reading straight out of a word processor. Which reminded me of my Whiz ap which I use for all note taking, and rough draft writing and which a few times I've copy/pasted the text of public domain books into. I have all of Shakespeare's plays and long poems stored that way for example. One of the benefits is the ability to control font size. Another is being able to color-code with highlighting, link between sections in the file or between other files, and take notes right into the same file and copy/paste the RTF text into other documents for the purpose of quoting.

I can also bookmark where I leave off by inserting a unique piece of text (like the @ you see in the above screenshot) that I can find via the search function tho if I highlight it with a bright color I can usually find it by a slow scroll.



I can also control the size of the window. I can read faster if I have a larger font and short line of text. Because of my RP or tunnel vision, I easily loose my way when scanning long lines of text and I've found the optimal to be a column containing three or four words or around 20 characters in a 12 to 14 point font.

I'm not sure how long it took me to transfer all seven books into the Whiz file. But however long it was, it could have been half that because I made a major oopsie. I was opening the files one chapter at a time and clicking select all then copy then going to the Whiz and pasting. I had all but the final book completed before I noticed that the chapter I'd just pasted was cut off at the end in the middle of a word. I quickly checked all of the chapters I had and found over half of them with the same problem. Turned out that I had been too trigger happy on the mouse and had done the select and copy before the file had finished opening. So I had to redo at lest three-quarters of the chapters.

After I got them all fixed and finished placing the chapters of the last book, I decided to see what Whiz would say about the word count because I'd been reading that it was considered the longest novel ever published with estimates at 1.5 million words. Well, for the English translation by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Stephen Hudson (v.7) Whiz counts it at 1.3 million. And that's including the Adelaide added text at the end of each chapter.

Seventeen non-final chapters contain this in the last lines:

Table of Contents Next

Last updated on Tue Jul 14 14:11:03 2009 for eBooks@Adelaide.

That first line was the navigation links.

And at the end of the final chapter of each book Adelaide left their calling card:

This web edition published by:

eBooks@Adelaide
The University of Adelaide Library
University of Adelaide
South Australia 5005
Table of Contents

Last updated on Tue Jul 14 14:11:04 2009 for eBooks@Adelaide.

All of the relevant Adelaide branding of their Creative Commons file has been preserved in a separate section (aka topic) of my Whiz file apart from those containing Proust's text so I could go through the seventeen plus seven chapters removing the excess text but I haven't decided whether to go to the trouble just to get a more accurate word count.

I did a lot of dipping into the text again during and after creating my complete copy. And then I read what probably amounted to several pages of chapter one. There are not page numbers so it is going to be hard to judge progress. other than to count the words in the sections I've read and divide by some number between 380 and 450 for an approximate idea of page count.

I don't know whether I'm going to aim to finish Swann's Way as one of my 20 for the Gilmore Girls Reading Challenge as it would be a huge investment in time. All by itself without its six sister novels it stands as one of the longest items on the list. Miller's Sexus, Gibbon's Decline and Fall, War and Peace and Moby Dick would probably surpass it but few if any of the rest. The total word count for Swann's Way is over 198K words and chapter one by itself is almost the length of a novella at over 21K words.

BTW my @ bookmark is 2700 words deep into Overture the first chapter. A tiny, tiny step in a long, long journey.

When I decided to go for the Rory level of 20 items I intended to favor the shorter and easier items like plays, short stories, children's and YA. Though I was planning to choose 2 or 3 more challenging items. I had in mind one of the Jane Austen or Charles Dickens which I have yet to read. But maybe I can plug away a bit each week over the rest of the year the way Rory's Grandpa did over several decades with Gibbon's huge tome.

One of the benefits of having it on my netbook is that it can go anywhere with me. It can go to Longview with me next month without adding a single ounce or cubic inch to my luggage. But the same is true for Jane Austen. Adelaide has every one of her novels.

Oh you should see their complete list of titles. I feel the hoarder in me getting all grabby. Just think of the possibilities. A library of a thousand classics that I can carry in my purse. Granted I lean toward large purses but you get the point.

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Fishing for Facts and Photos

One of the ways Book-it promoted the upcoming production of The River Why in Seattle was by a flash fish mob. Fun and quirky just like the novel.

I spent the last six writing this and the previous post. This one first. Does that confuse you? Well beginning with the next paragraph and to the end was written in the previous post before what now appears there was written. Then I realized that I hadn't yet answered the question in the title, Why The River Why? So I went back to the top and thought to add a paragraph or two of the explanation I had in mind. And once again I seemed to loose my ability to detect when enough was enough and I'd soon doubled the post in length and the bottom half was a complete change in subject. I considered deleting it or moving it into my journal but then I had the thought that if I split the post in two I'd have Wednesday's as well as Tuesday's post done, leaving me free until after dinner on Thursday if I chose. (I just took all the words of both posts over to Whiz so I could use the word counter. 2644. Only 600 some odd short of 2 days NaNo quota!!! If only it were November.)

I have just spent the bulk of the last 24 hours working on my River Why profile for Book Drum. Visit my December post Drumming for Books if this confuzzles you.

At any rate, this was the second over 16 hour session I put in on it in the last week. It was Thursday/Friday when I spent over six hours just looking for a photo of David James Duncan that was either creative commons or had a clear provenance with contact info for its owner so I could request permissions for its use on a commercial site such as Book Drum.

I had expected that to be a fairly easy task as I've encountered so many author photos in so many venues in my wanderings on the web. I knew it was common for there to be a press packet available for journalists and failing that at least a contact page somewhere on the author's or publishers sites.

But David James Duncan's site was under construction and had only the front page. No about, no contact, no press packet. Only one photo and that with no attribution. I finally had to forgo my goal of populating the author page of my profile for The River Why before I quit my session to sleep. And discouraged by that, I did not pick up where I left off when I awoke but instead buried myself in watching DVDs for a good twelve hours over the weekend.

One of those DVD was Normal People Scare me which I posted about and it set me off on another round of surfing the Asperger/Autism resources online, collecting links and notes. I also slept hard and Sunday got to go out to dinner with Ed and then shopping for crochet thread. My first time out of this house in two weeks!

So last night I set myself to get it done already! I decided I would make one more quick pass through the usual motions, collecting the links and recording my moves so that I could describe them in an email to the editor at Book Drum so he would know what ground I had covered when I asked his advice. And once I had that info, I would proceed to organize the rest of the material I had collected for the Author page: links to some of his essays online, his web page, the Wikipedea article on him; facts pertaining to the timeline of his life for the bio; lists of his published works and awards. I had pages and pages of these in my note taking ap WhizFolders. Well, it would be pages and pages if the topic windows weren't as bottomless as Crater Lake, holding potentially as much as my RAM could handle.

OK, couldn't help myself had to check. Word count on one topic was nearly 4K and the other nearly 2K and that's with 20-90+ character links making up at least 30% of the total character count.

So there was a lot of info and it was loosely organized by type but there was still a number of links I'd collected that I hadn't visited yet to confirm their usefulness or at the least their aliveness. And of course that only led me to more links that had to be followed. Sigh.

And once followed, explored, read, contemplated. I began the project soon after I posted last night. Meaning soon after 1AM. And it was 1PM before I was finally satisfied with the completeness, tidiness, accuracy, and integrity of the material in Whiz and was ready to start transferring it to Book Drum.

Of course it took me an hour to get un-clumsy with the Book Drum platform. It has a resemblance to blogger from over five years ago. It's clunky and glitchy. I like to say cranky and by the time I started working with it so was I. Yeah, clunky, glitchy and cranky.

When I got about two-thirds done with creating the 30 links (30 before I noticed I'd put the same info into two different lists and had to eliminate one) I realized I'd been making a colossal error when filling out the link dialog form. I thought the second box under the URL box was meant for the highlighted text that you wanted turned into the link and so I'd been making the extra step of returning to copy that text as soon as I'd dropped the link in. Then one time I goofed and didn't get the text copied so when I returned to the dialog box and pasted I found I'd pasted in the link again but I noticed that just as I clicked to insert the link. When I returned to the work area to click the highlight off I discovered that the hover text now had the link in it instead of a simple copy of the highlighted text.

Of course! Duh!!!! Makes perfect sense. Now that is useful info. I vaguely wondered why that hover text was only mirroring the highlighted text. But I hadn't made the connection with the text I was pasting into that form. *shakes head and thumps it with fists*

So I did it the right way for the remaining 8 links and then went back and re-did the rest. By then I'd been up for 28 hours and still had this post to do

Was planning to do a quick video post related to what I've been working on. Hence the vid that heads this. But once I started typing something cut loose. I tend to get hypergraphic when sleep-deprived anyway but I think it had something to do with reading so much by and about a writer all day and manipulating words with cut and paste but doing very little composing and something in me was itching too be cut loose.

No, I was not plagiarizing. I was taking bare, essential facts: proper names, dates, titles, a few nouns and verbs and arranging them in logical groups or sequence and then adding whatever was needed to make coherent sentences.

Something about what I've been doing in the last 30 some hours must have sparked something major in me though because during dinner tonight while I was 'chewing the cud' so to speak, I had a flash of insight into the characters of my FOS story world, into the very plot and timeline tangle that has had me stalled out for months. I ruminated on it while doing dishes and planned to get finished fixing those links, then get a quick post up and then spend a half hour or so getting those thoughts down in the FOS worksheet WhizFolder. I was thinking I would just type wild kinda like I'm doing now without worrying too much about keeping perfect order of the info--just get those ideas recorded so I wouldn't forget.

Because I could very well forget as I'm likely to crash down off this lit up brain state and sleep like I'm dead for ten to twelve hours and then wake with a brain that feels like chewed cud for the first four to six hours.

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My Pretties

I was finally able to open my mind map of my story world after installing Xmind on my netbook. The screen shot above shows the entire thing--what there is of it so far--on screen at once but to get it I had to shrink it to 40%. Truthfully most of the info in here duplicates what is already in my WhizFolder files for the story world. But this format allows me to see it graphically instead of hierarchically; to see it as an interconnected web instead of a series of outlines.

And I must say it is simply prettier with the color coded elements and gazing at it, manipulating its elements makes my fingers itch for the keyboard to get ideas down. Even though it is possible to write lengthy text documents in the mind maps, I don't wish to use it that way. I would rather return to Whiz for that. What the mind map helps with is fiddling with relationships among story elements--timelines and plot lines and family trees; character lists and place lists and novel/story/scene lists; and that pesky issue of defining the cult central to the story line--its beliefs, history, settings, culture.

I'm working with a roster of over 120 characters of which 70% at least belong to a few intermingled family lines of eight generations spanning 120 years or so. There are 16 to 20 separate stories in progress and I'm still unsure if it will be one huge novel or a collection of interrelated novellas and short stories.

Well it won't be anything but a private little hobby if I don't start translating the daydream in my mind into full blown scenes on the screen/page.

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So Much for Sunday Serenity, So Long Holiday Spirit

moar kitteh ROFLOL

This week, calling this blog Joystory is like calling a mudpie chocolate bliss.

Oh, I am so far, far, far from feeling the spirit of Xmas or New Years.

I've been trying so hard to hang on to a sliver of it, a glimmer of it, with one wham after another in the last three weeks or so splashing muck all over it. The crowning wham was the crapout of of my laptop screen this morning. I'm typing this on Ed's laptop. He suspects a driver failure on mine. He thinks we might be able to hook the two together with a USB cable so that we can opporate mine with this one's keyboard so I can get all my files off. But he can't promise to get off work in time to go shopping for one any time before Xmas so that probably means Saturday or later.

I'm supposed to leave for Longview sometime the week after Xmas, to be there for my Mom's birthday. Now it's looking like I'm going to be stuck carrying my files on thumb drives and scrounging time on their PC to blog, check email, write (as if) and work on the family photo scanning project. I'm supposed to be there for two to three weeks.

Actually, I'm supposed to be arriving back home right about now--yesterday, today or tomorrow. The original plan was for me to travel back with my mom and sister when they passed through here the Tuesday after Thanksgiving on their way back from visiting family and attending a Bible conference in Gerber, CA about a 3 hour drive south of us. But on Thanksgiving day at Ed's family get-to-gether the plans were set for his family to celebrate Xmas on December 12th as Ed's brother, traveling down from Toutle, WA couldn't get Xmas week off. At that gathering we all drew names out of a bowl for our secret Santa recipiant and I drew one of the names I really knew how to do for. I was psyched to draw that name. But then I learned the gift exchange would be during the time I was gone. I was dithering about whether to go or stay when Ed took it upon himself to ask my mom and sister (when they stopped on their way south on Thanksgiving) if he could keep me until after Xmas and then they could have me for Mom's birthday, January 3rd and a couple weeks beyond. Everybody was happy with that concept.

We also learned that week (it may have been Thanksgiving day or a day or two earlier) that our niece who got married two years ago and has been living in Montana ever since was expecting a baby in June and planned to bring the baby to visit Washington and Oregon family within a month or so of the birth.

I was high on Holiday spirit that weekend and for most of the following week. I pushed acrosss the NaNo finish line by noon on Monday and then spent several days relaxing, doing what I felt like doing--reading novels, sleeping, crocheting, reading blogs, cleaning out email inboxes and watching Gilmore Girls with Ed every evening. If only I knew then how short the life of my LT really was.
I think it was the first weekend in December we got news that Ed's brother in Toutle was going to have to cancel his plans to come here on the 12th as his 90 something father-in-law was very ill and possibly dying. The earliest he could make the trip would be New Year's weekend. You can see how that was going to mess up my plans to go north immediately after Xmas. But then we got to thinking that I could maybe ride back with them. Toutle is very close to Longview. Close enough Ed and I used to babysit their kids when we were living in Longview. Yes, one of them is the young lady now living in Montana. She has two siblings, a brother and sister, and we've not seen any of them since the summer the younger girl graduated from high-school in 2007.

So that was their grandpa who was possibly dying that first weekend of December. Well he raillied and seems to be holding his own for the moment. But by then Ed's brother had already switched his days off and couldn't change them back. So our whole family Xmas was still going to be held about a week late.

I attempted a little rally of my own last week. All that crocheting was part of it. It helps me think. And then when Ed's folks left town Thursday morning for an overnight trip, I decided to use the time they were gone to do laundry and clean our room. I told most of that story in a previous post. The wham came when I got a muscle spasm in my lower back while sorting laundry. In spite of it I pushed on and got four loads of clothes and bedding thru the machines, decluttered our room and bagged the garbage, and put the livingroom (where I'd moved my 'office' and moved in the mini-tramp from the porch) kitchen (where Ed had prepared for me halibut fillets on a bed of greens, mushrooms, tomato and avocado) laundry area and bathroom) before Ed's folks got home.

Meanwhile, when taking breaks while waiting on the machines or to give my back a break, I busied myself with a major tidy-up task in my laptop files. While working on that book review of The Brutal Telling, last week I had decided that I really needed to get all those partial book reviews copy/pasted from their MS Works documents into my WhizFolders Pro Book Review document. I had moved about twenty or so of the most nearly completed last October if I'm remembering right and managed to get several posted. I needed to get them into the WhizFolder document so I could take a good look and decide which ones were worth pursuing, which ones I needed to send for at the library either to finish, reference or to help me decide whether to pursue a review.

Besides getting their topics created in Whiz makes them available to drop notes and links I come across and thus build the skeleton of a review with a slow calcium drip and prep its wardrobe one thread at a time.

I transferred 60 to 80 of them and in the process created bib slips for each of them in my Whiz Reading Journal as well as review topics in the Whiz book review document (there are now over 150). The 'bib slip' file in the reading journal is where I record the bibliography info for any book I encounter and especially engage with (even wishlists) and manage library books from ordering to renewing to returning and keep track of page numbers I leave off on and maybe some notes as to the relevance to any research project or WIP.

If I was on my LT I could take a screen shot of Whiz and post it here. I was going to go grab the one from Thursday's post and repost it here but what's the point. You can scroll down or go here to see it. Or click on the WhizFolder lable and find other posts where I sing its praises. In one of them you'll find the link to the WhizFolder Pro site. Or just Google or Yahoo. My link is in my Whiz Web Map and two or three other handy locations in WhizFolders. As are every important, regularly used link. How am I going to manage without it? For even a few days?

Well I'm getting some hints while doing this post without it and it is not a pretty picture. I have done all and I mean all draft work (except for simple, short and shallow blog posts) and note managing in Whiz for nearly two years now. All and I mean ALL of my bookmarks for both the web and my files are in my WhizFolder files. Many of my passwords and screen names as well though I seldom needed them since Firefox was set to remember me.

I did manage to back up my writing files onto a thumb drive before the screen sighed its last. That and my ebook folder were the only ones that would still fit on the same thumbs. My graphics file and my audio/video files had gone outtasight. While I was in Longview my entire graphics file fit on a 4GB with a sliver of room to spare so I knew I was going to need to split it up next time and that is why I procrastinated on backing it up. I had no idea it had nearly doubled in size--with all the digital pics I dumped in from my camera and all the family photos I scanned while in Longview, and the graphics for that mysterious website Ed and I have been working on during his off seasons for the last couple years, which I can't be specific about for fear of someone else grabbing onto the concept and running with it.

As for the audio files? They used to fit on a 2GB. Just some music and an audio book. That was before I downloaded itunes and started loading up on free podcasts. Now I'm not sure where they sit but I'm pretty sure its in the double-digit GB as in over 10, possibly closer to 20. I couldn't even begin to think about them this afternoon so I put my focus on the graphics. I hoped to get them backed up. Especially the family photo scan folder, my camera dump, my Pics for Posting folder where I've put pics collected or processed for web display. I spent hours combing through every file looking for things I could delete. There were a lot of duplicates but not enough. They could only dimple the mass that I needed to shink. I see now I wasted a lot of time in dithering and shuffling files around trying to make it easier for later so that related things could be on the same thumb. I should have just bundled them however they would fit and made the move.

And then used the extra time, if any, to see if I could figure out how to move the WhizFolder program onto a thumb. It's supposed to be possible. Tho some of the features are deactivated or something.

I was getting very close to ready to move them when I was called to dinner. I have never wanted so badly to just ignore that call and boy that's saying something. I dreaded finding the screen black again when I got back from doing dishes. I had no appetite. Was even nauseated. My back tensed up and threatened to spasm on me again while I did dishes. But when I got back to the room and lifted the lid of my laptop the screen was still on. I set about clearing a spot to sit as Ed had moved the stuff I'd spread out on the bed onto my side while I was in the kitchen. It was only 7 and he was getting ready to crash. The ten hour days are catching up with him.

While I was showing him the crochet project I started this morning before all the hullabaloo with the LT, I kept glancing at the screen and I saw it start to flicker, wobble, lines scrolling up, the corners brown out. I said Look that's what I'm talking about and he nodded and then Wham! it went black.

That's when he told me it looked more like a driver crash than a failure of the hardware. And while I attempted to get the image back by forcing a reboot again...and again... and again, he got out his laptop and set me up with a desktop. If you're remembering that post back before NaNo when I blogged about him setting me up with a desktop on his Vista and me spending hours getting all the settings to my liking--big fonts, menus, scroll bars, color scheme, background, and so forth, well, just this past weekend he upgraded to Windows 7 so I have to start from scratch.

Meanwhile I'm used to using a mouse and I'm having a hard time getting this touchpad to cooperate. It's more sensitive than mine ever was and everytime I want to scroll a couple lines I end up at the top or bottom of the page. I'm used to using Firefox and he hasn't downloaded it yet. I'm used to having certain keys identifiable by touch because of the textured stickers I put on them. Not only aren't they tagged for my fingers but many aren'te even in the same place--like delete. And I can't have a real light on in here right now. And I have his LT on a box on the foot of the bed and am sitting half sideways which is making my lower back very ticked with me. I should have taken it in the other room but when I started Ed's folks were still watching TV out there and I thought I would be done in 30 minutes tops.

My plan when Ed got up this morning was to spend the day reading and crocheting when my eyes need to rest. After that 17 hour sleep I had Saturday I wasn't ready to sleep, I was just getting my brain back when he got up at 4AM. So I got coffee out of the pot he made and back in our room alone, I got down my big bag of yarn because I had an idea for an Xmas present for someone. Can't say what or who just yet, just in case. I haven't crocheted with yarn since highschool. It's quite different.

So I started my news pod casts playing in iTunes and listened while I crocheted. I intended to start reading after Ed left and thus fear of interruption with him. But I got hooked and was still at it between 9:30 and 10AM when I looked up to see my screen black.

It's now almost 1AM and I still haven't slept since 4:30 Saturday. I began this post at 9Pm, scheduling it to post after midnight. But I'm still writing. I didn't start out intending to go into this much detail. This is the kind of thing I do in my personal journal--tho I do admit quite a bit more tidy here--vomit words onto the page/screen. I can't access my journal--yes, its in a WhizFolder--so I guess I'm making this a substitute.

I'm about wiped. But I haven't even finished listing all the Whams from this past week yet. I think I'm trying to avoid having to think about them. Here goes...

My sister-friend Jamie almost died a week ago last Thursday. She'd been having breathing issues for over a year. She sounded like Darth Vader. They had been running tests on Thrusday and it all took so long that the Doctor who'd seen her earlier in the day had gone home and the Dr on call who took over her case consulted with her over the phone--they were in the same complex but she was in reception and he in his office or radiology, not sure. So after making her wait for hours and hours for the results of all these tests he calls her on the phone and tells her they found no evidence of an obstruction. She was free to go. She'd been living with this for a year after all so what was another night? He didn't even bother to meet her face to face and hear the sound of her breathing.
It was the receptionist who looked alarmed (so my sister who waited with Jamie all day tells me) and she suggested quite firmly that Jamie not spend the night alone at her apartment. So she was going home with my sister to my mom's house where Jamie lived from age 13 to 21 as my parent's ward. But they were halfway there when Jamie's biological sister who lives in the deep south now got on the phone with my sister and told her to take her back and make them take care of her. (a total paraphrase if you get my drift) So they went back and went to ER. Where they called the ENT (ear nose throat) guy from home. Radiology had been looking at bronchial tubes and lungs but the obstruction was in her windpipe just below the voice box. Scar tissue had occluded 90 percent of her airway. It was supposed to be the size of a quarter but it was the size of a BB.

They had to send her by ambulance to OHSU in Portland, OR where the next day they stretched the airway with a balloon and took a biopsy. Thank God there was no evidence of cancer cells. It's hard to know what caused it tho bacteria infection is one possibility and she has had a lot of lingering coughs over the last several years. At least that Wham had a happy ending.

But I stressed through the whole of Thursday night and into Friday evening. And I couldn't help but think that only if I'd gone north as planned, I would have been there to hold her hand instead of here fretting and refreshing my email and checking my IM every five minutes. Jamie is almost young enough to be my daughter--if I'd been a teen mom, I'd have a kid her age. I babysat her a couple of times when she was little and after she lived with my parents she spent a lot of time at my appartment and it was during those years our relationship developed into the sistership it is now. Love you so much sis!!! Go here to read Jamie's post about the ordeal.

She and I are often IMing half the night but I haven't heard much from her since the day after her surgery as her biological sister flew to her side as soon as she could. Jamie's sister was only a couple years behind me in school.

That wasn't the last Wham--the last before the laptop crash, I mean. Not even the penultimate one. Which is this. My neice in Montana lost her baby Wedensday. A lot of the busy work I've done since has been an attempt to take my mind off that.

Here's the last: Her parents were driving over from Toutle WA to see her and hit a patch of ice on one of those Montana mountain roads. They crashed into a guardrail totaling their van so bad they were penned in. Then an eighteen wheeler went by them and it hit ice and the trailer slewed causing the driver to drive over the edge into the ravine. Which they witnessed in fear it was going to slide into them, or that one of the other cars going by would. The truck driver, a woman, lived but was in critical condition. There was a man in the sleeper and he walked away, even climbed out of the ravine without help. As for Ed's brother and his wife, they too walked away once their doors were pried or cut open.

But now they are having trouble finding a rental car they can take out of Montana and he has to be back at work by Tuesday. Oh, and he traded days off with someone so he could make that trip and now what with his transportation iffy who knows if he's going to make it for Xmas at all.

I rather doubt anyone has made it to the end of this. Along about the sixth paragraph I began to realize I was most likely conversing with myself but that's OK. This is how I process.

It is now 2:30AM. *head shaking* Ed will be up in 90 minutes. My hands, wrists, forearms, elbows and sholders are all wondering if it's NaNo time again already.
Excuse me if I don't proof read.

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Taking Stock

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Anyone who knows my history regarding packing whether for a day trip, my book bags for school, or that 6-12 week stay at my mom's a year ago after her hip surgery and stroke that turned into 6 months, would totally ROTFLOL at the sight of that pic heading my blog post. I'm currently anticipating packing for a 2 to 3 week visit to my mom's just after Xmas which I intend to keep inside sane boundaries but that is only tangentially related to what I really want to talk about here.

The weird way my mind works took me in another direction after my initial reaction to seeing that pic of a cat sitting inside the harness of a humungous backpack on icanhascheezeburger.com. Sure I briefly flashed on memories of packing a year ago and the snickers and head-shaking of certain others about the amount of stuff I transported 300 odd miles and then on the current plans to pack for this year's more typical holiday visit but then I started making an analogy with the a slew of other overflowing, overstuffed, and over-committed elements of my daily life. Like my todo lists, my projects list, my closet and drawers, my library account, my bookshelves, my clothes hamper, my WIP story world (120+ characters & 120+ years), my TBR piles (To Be Read and To Be Reviewed), my electronic files, my dreams and ambitions. In fact just about everything except my wallet and bank account which contain zip--in essence neither exist.

Ever since NaNoWriMo closed November 31 I've been doing a lot of thinking about all that, taking stock of where things stand as opposed to what I intended when I set certain things in motion. Like this blog for instance. When a post like last night's book review takes me ten hours to prepare and as I work on it I am faced with the list of reviews-in-waiting in various stages of production and remembering my determination throughout November to keep my fiction writing on the front burner after November 31st, I have to wonder if I've got my priorities in proper order.

I justify the book reviews and blogging as support for what I claim is my true passion: to write my own stories, essays and poems and get exposure for them and maybe in the process generate some income to support my story (and needle & thread) habits and maybe contribute to our getting into our own home again where I can hope to have an 'office' that is not in the same room where Ed sleeps.

The book reviews serve multiple purposes: they draw visitor's to Joystory which has the potential of making it worth monetizing; they brought me opportunities to do reviews for review copies of books and to host giveaways which are great fun as well as bringing the page views; the emotional support from the sense of belonging to a worldwide reading community; and the requirement to analyze and put into words what I've learned about my craft from my encounter with another's work.

That last is the one most important in regards to my own work and thus the one tipping the balance towards justifying continuing to write and post reviews, even to continue to blog. But if I can't also give a similar amount of my time and energy and creativity to my own WIP? The balance tips the other way. Or ought to.

When was the last time I spent ten hours writing my stories outside of November?


This screenshot shows less than a third of the reviews in progress in my files. This is my note taking ap, WhizFolders Pro, in which I do all note taking and draft work for all writing since I got it nearly two years ago. Each of the items in the list on the left is a review that when clicked on will open in the window on the right to view or edit. The color code I'm using: Red = books begun but not finished before due back at library; Green = books I'm currently reading and in my possession; Yellow = books still in my possession which I've finished reading; Magenta = books I've finished reading but that went back to the library before I finished the review; White (not shown) = reviews mostly written but needing a final polish, fact check or links.

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Friday Forays in Fiction: NaNoWriMo 2009 Intentions

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This will be my 6th NaNo and partly because of the stress factor I seriously considered not participating this year. But the biggest factor weighing against is that because of NaNo I keep putting off working on the stories I really have my heart in because 1) I don’t want to ruin them by making a mess & 2) I thot I shouldn’t because the story already has several K of words and 3) because of anticipating NaNo each year I shy away from working on virgin stories btwn NaNos because I might want to use them for NaNo this year or next.

And then a few weeks ago a writer friend whom I respect declared on her blog her intent to keep working on the novel she'd begun several weeks ago, counting for NaNo only the words generated after midnight November 1st. And I started thinking outside the box. Who would I be harming if I were to work on a WIP as long as I didn’t count words written before Nov 1st? It's not like by 'winning' I'm taking anything away from anyone else. And to not participate would deprive me of one of the joys of my year--the sense of being part of something; of dreaming my stories and writing while knowing for certain I'm not alone in the world in what possesses me; the feeling of belonging while not denying those very things which define me.

And I went further. Why do I have to confine myself to one character’s story and POV? Just because their story might make a separate novel? After all these characters all grew out of one original story that I first thought was a single novel. And this is where continuing to participate in NaNo is a detriment to my output because in the eleven months between NaNos I resist the urges to work with certain character's stories because I'm saving them for NaNo. So in this way my continued participation in NaNo goes against the spirit of NaNo which is to facilitate the output of more stories not less.

And here's the rub. For the last two months I’ve been working intensely with the entire 100 year timeline and 100+ character roster again ‘as if’ it were a single story and I am intensely engaged in it and champing at the bit to start writing scenes but holding back because of NaNo.

I have been dreading having to shift my focus which has been to establish the time line of events for each of the major characters and their individual stories and that of the cult founded in the generation before Faye’s birth. That cult and its various branches and leaders acts as the primary antagonist for nearly all of the potential protagonist characters. And the fact I lack clarity on it is the main reason I have so many partial stories.

So I’ve just decided that I’m going to continue working with the entire story world. Even previous NaNo ‘novels’ for why should it matter if the words of my 50K ultimately belong to one, two, or twelve novels as long as I don’t include words in the verifier written before Nov 1st?

To facilitate keeping track of word count and also to allow me to feel as though each day of NaNo is a fresh start, I've created a separate WhizFolder called NaNo 2009 with one topic containing a minimal number of links to the FOS related files and my NaNo profile for daily word count. One topic contains a statement of my intent for the occasional refresher. And I will add one topic per day with that date as it's title in which I will put all of that day's word output. Sometimes I will write off the cuff in that topic window and copy/paste it to whichever FOS Whiz it most belongs. Other times I may have written inside the Whiz of the FOS worksheets or one of the currently separate novels and will then copy/paste those into the day's topic in Nano 2009. Over at NaNo on my profile I'll soon be updating my novel info and using the title By Their Fruits. I may be setting up a separate Whiz to collect all things Shakespeare and bring the scattered material over from all the FOS Whiz and if so will probably add that link as well.

This will give me a place to store the entire text of some selected Shakespeare plays as well. Beginning with Macbeth the play Faye, Julia and Wilma will be producing with high school students in one planned story. Then, of course, there is the Estelle character who speaks only in Shakespeare phrases taken from plays and sonnets. Her comments are always cogent and pertinent to what is going on around her.

A screen shot of my NaNo 2009 WhizFolder

The four links:

To my NaNoWriMo profile where I'll update my word count each day.

To my Xmind mindmap of my FOS story world which has been my playground for the last month.

To the FOS worksheets WhizFolder topic 'Novels" which contains the links to each story's Whiz.

To my Story Garden Whiz topic Harpy Shampoo where I keep antidotes to writer's block and inhibition, like suggested exercises and inspirational quotes. Story Garden is also where I collect advice gleaned from books, blogs and etc on all aspects of story making (plot, dialog, theme, metaphor, voice, etc.) and have recently added publishing info sections.

Story Garden is also set up to collect my new story ideas but hasn't been used that way much because I've been so overwhelmed with the WIP I already have going I've been squashing new ideas. I have really been feeling bad about that and believe it is a bad impulse, showing ingratitude to the muse. And as mentioned above, I traced the problem to NaNo participation. If my compromise with the NaNo 'rules' doesn't work to enhance and encourage my work output this year, including in the next ten months, I may have to rethink my involvement again next year. I've come to the point where I need to give my devotion to my stories. The rest is peripheral.

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Arrrgg!!!

The results of the eye exam today were great and I was given the go ahead to order new lenses which we will do on Friday (payday) and best news of all: it should only take four working days before they are ready so I have an excellent chance of having them in time for Dewey's 24 Hour Read-a-Thon on the 24th.

When I sat down here after dinner and dishes I was pleased at the early start I was getting, at how ambitious and energetic I still felt even after the stress and energy expended today to get ready for and then go to my third post-op eye exam. I was planning to prepare a book review for one of the books I had finished and which had to go back to the library this morning. I'd spent last night's session taking notes on two of those books and know that if I'm going to prepare a review without the book beside me it had better be within the next 20-50 hours or so for the longer I wait the less reliable my memory will be.

I'd spent the hour of kitchen clean-up thinking about and composing sentences and paragraphs and outlines in my head. I was eager to proceed. I have too many barely begun book reviews in my files as is, sitting there waiting for me to re-order the books and when they wait too long the chances are I'll have to practically re-read the book. And they often wait and wait and wait because my library card is full to bursting most of the time with 40-60 items checked out and 20-40 lined up in my requests queues.

So I was motivated and eager and had the energy and my eyes weren't fatigued (partly because I hadn't already spent hours and hours reading because of the eye doctor appointment) so I opened a draft in Blogger. But then decided to first finish dealing with my email inbox which project had been interrupted when I was called to dinner. This involved opening a PDF file linked in one email. Which took endless minutes to open and then crashed the browser. After which I was sent to a Microsoft error report page which recommended I download the latest version of Adobe which had addressed the bug that caused the crash.

During the download I was informed that I needed to give Firefox permission to install add-ons from the Adobe site and that took me a good fifteen minutes to figure out how to do. And just as I got the website added to the permissions list the Adobe program proper alerted me that it had a download ready to install. I thought it was the same one I thought I'd begun from the Microsoft error report page but I'd not looked at the edition numbers closely enough as the download the Adobe program was asking to install was 8 point something while the one recommended by the error report was 9 point something but I didn't realize this until after clicking install.

So I waited patiently through the install of 8 point something, following its directions which included closing all open PDF files and all Adobe windows other than the download/install window which meant I had to close Firefox with all tabs including email, blogger post draft and several others relating to tasks I had lined up for this work session.

Then when the install was complete I was informed that there was another update available (9) and highly recommended so I started the download (over 40 MB) and waited patiently for it to complete and then install.

After the install I was informed that Adobe need to restart my system to complete the install. I do feel lucky that it at least asked first. Because that gave me a chance to close the other programs I had open properly. Especially WhizFolder which when not closed by its protocol will not remember which windows (files) were open and their positions on the desktop and when that happens it can take me up to 30 minutes to recreate my preferred arrangement.

And then there was iTunes which had a video podcast on pause which if I had not been able to mark it as new before closing the program might have been auto-deleted during the shutdown or reloading of the program.

Luckily I didn't have a Free Cell game in progress so I could just close that along with Live Messenger and the Onscreen Keyboard which I keep up sometimes for the convenience of being able to mouse keystrokes when editing or surfing or using keyboard shortcuts.

So. Once I had all programs closed properly I clicked 'restart' on the download dialog that I'd left sitting there and waited patiently through the shutdown and then waited patiently through the reloading of my desktop. And by the time I was free to open Whiz (where the notes for the reviews are stored) and the browser again I'd lost 90 minutes and all my oomph. I heard the echoes of a wailed 'Arrrggh!!!' in my head which reminded me of the picture I'd recently seen on art.com (click the pic to see its catalog page) and I decided to go with a flat out whine post for tonight.

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Character IS Plot

Two of the three page roster for my FOS storyworld which so far runs to 115 individuals.

I remember having read this somewhere but I'm not sure where so I can't give proper credit. But this week I've seen it in operation. As I worked on generating that list of characters from all of the WIP set in the FOS storyworld some of the blocks preventing me from from advancing individual stories began to dissolve. Not all. I'm far from there yet but I'm seeing hints.

More than hints. I have the name of the mysterious Founder of the bizarre cult that is the main antagonist for several of the novels and a major influence on nearly all of them. I know he was born during or shortly after WWII and split off from the religious group he was originally affiliated with in the mid 30s. I know a bit about his motives and temperament and a bit more about his doctrine and belief system. Not enough yet but its way more than I had a week ago.

The list of characters I harvested out of all of the story files grew to 115. After grouping them loosly by the story/novel they figure most prominently in, I printed off the list. It's three pages, two of which are featured in that screen shot above.

The next step is to created a separate topic in the WhizFolder document FOS Worksheets which I created for the express purpose of organizing and keeping tabs on all of the elements of the story world that might tend to affect the entire collection of stories. Like the roster and the time line.

As I create those Whiz topics--which are like mini documents inside the main document--I'll be dropping all relevant info regarding the characters into them and in the cases of major characters creating subtopics so I don't have to scroll thru several thousand words to find one fact.

This is where I'll do the character sketches and other exercises that help flesh out a character. Like Laurie Hutzler's The Emotional Toolbox and The Nine Character Types. I was introduced to these by Joely Sue Burkart nearly two years ago and since then have occasionally found a concept useful when it occurred to me to try it or have had an aha thought about one of my characters while reading the advice on Laurie's or Joely's sites but I've never applied myself to putting all the characters of a WIP through their paces as delineated by Hutzler. That's what I'm setting out to do now for all dozen plus WIP already in the storyworld though I will be focusing more intensely on a select few--Faye's story and Crystal's story because they are two of the most dependent on the cult thread which must be well defined before I can proceed; and Julia's story, which is tightly entwined with her twin Faye's story, because if I can solve the puzzle of the cult by the end of October than I can run with Julia's story for my NaNo novel.

I'm itching to start writing scenes again and hope to do so for Faye's and Crystal's stories but I'll restrain myself with Julia's story until November 1, doing only prep work--character sketches, time line, plot, scene lists, research etc.

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What's in a Name?

Everything. For me the very names of the characters contain the story within them in the same way a seed contains the flower. Today my focus on my FOS WIPs has been to collect all the names of all the characters from all twelve novels set in this story wold into a single document. Some I discovered don't have names or have only a first or only a last. But many have first, middle, last (maiden and married for some women); and various aka: adopted; nick names, alias, pseudonym, stage, pen.

The good news is that I think I've about got them all collected. The bad news is there are over one hundred and about twenty percent have less than a full name--half of those have only a first or only a last and the other half have only a designation of relationship--spouse of, sibling of, boss of, teacher of, coach of, mother of etc. Now I wouldn't have bothered to put them in the list if they were only that roll and not something more in their own right. Many of them once had names which were lost when I lost my manuscripts and files in 2001. So much of what I'm doing is as much reconstruction as construction of these stories.

My head is swimming in names. Not just the names on the list but the names at Think Baby Names that I looked at while selecting names. And not just the names but their meaning, etymology, ethnicity, gender. Because just any ole name won't do for even the most minor of character for the name embodies the character of the character. The name is a symbol of what roll that character has for the story and I don't mean the role he plays in it (as parent, sibling, teacher, waitress, protagonist, friend, villain, etc) but the role he plays as carrier of meaning, theme and image for the story.



The next step now that I've got most of the names collected from the various story files is to start working at discovering the full names of those who still lack them while simultaneously creating a separate topic for each one in the WhizFolder file FOS Worksheets in which to collect all relevant info about them and their roles, keep track of where and when they turn up in the various novels, etc. I've discovered, and not for the first time, that playing in the character files for a story helps me develop the story. By spending time getting to know the character inside and out I have invited them to start telling me their story and most of them are eager to do so.



And while I work on fleshing out my characters with names and roles I will also work at adding relevant dates to the time line in FOS Worksheets as well. And there will be a natural progression from that to listing intended scenes for the stories. And once that builds up a head of steam....

But I know I can't expect to get far in any of the stories until I figure out who the heck is the founder of the cult and why and exactly what it's belief system is. Well, today I believe I discovered approximately when he was born and his probable name. That's half the story...

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Friday Forays In Fiction: File Fiddling

This week I continued the project I talked about in detail in last week's Friday Forays In Fiction post. I took the basic topic outline that I developed with Mobile Hopes WhizFolder during NaNo and placed it into all of my fiction WIP WhizFolders. There are thirteen of them. The first four times I recreated these topics one by one from scratch:

VITAL INFO
>Log
>Tasks
>Reference
>>Links
>>Biblio
>>Quotes
NOTES TO SELF
>INTENT
>On Topic From Archives
>Ramblings and Musings
RANDOM INSIRATION
STORYWORK
>PLOT
>TIMELINE
>THEME
>METAPHOR
>EVENTS
>IMAGES
>CHARACTERS
SCENES

Then I discovered that I could copy the entire list of topics and paste them into the next WhizFolder, preserving their nest heirarchy. So the next ten or so went very quick. Once this basic outline existed in a WIP WhizFolder, I could then use the drag and drop function to place each of the previously existing topics in this nest where they fit the best.

Most of this list seems self-explanitory to me but then I've been working with it for months. The story itself goes under the SCENE section. I work in scenes not chapters or I might have called that section CHAPTERS. In some of the files I changed SCENES to something more specific to the title of the work. In every one, though, any existing scenes were moved inside as child topics.

Everything above the topic SCENES is for storing notes, research, resources, and character sketches. "On Topic From Archives" is where I can copy/paste material I wrote about the WIP in my journal, an email or my blog. Under VITAL INFO the topics "Log" and "Tasks" are where I record and timestamp any encounters with the file that result in a significant change (Log) and keep a todo list (Tasks). During NaNo Mobile Hopes had another topic here for keeping track of Wordcount.

This kind of work on my files can be fitted into the odd moments I find in my current chaotic schedule (now there is an oxymoron if I've ever hear one!). It serves to keep my mind engaged in the story worlds. It also is making my fingers and mind itch to start writing actual scenes--narrative, dialog, description. Maybe eventually I will find a way to fit scene work into the odd moment. If not I will at least have kept the stories' life blood flowing in my heart.

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Friday Forays In Fiction: Cleaning Up Messes

I have had a very productive week in regards to my fiction work. No scene writing yet but I've begun to tackle the huge mess in my files--especially in the five NaNo novel's files. I haven't gotten to them all yet of course but I've made huge inroads on the last two--2008's Mobile Hopes and 2007's Spring Fever. Also on the Fruits of the Spirit Worksheets and Faye's and Crystal's stories from that story world.

What I set out to do this week was to organize the WhizFolder topics for Faye's and Crystal's stories and that of Spring Fever on the pattern I developed for Mobile Hopes during NaNo this past November. Mobile Hopes was the first novel I began work on in WhizFolder Pro. All previous NaNo novels had begun in the free version, WhizNotes. Stories previous to that had begun in various word processors and their text moved into WhizNote files after I was introduced to it in 2004.

It was a year ago this week that I acquired the upgrade to WhizFolder Organizer Pro. Although I converted all the WhizNote files to the new WhizFolder within a couple weeks of that I did not work with any but Crystal's story which didn't even have its own separate file since she began as a peripheral character in Faye's story--one of the characters I think of as Faye's Strays. Now her story has grown so big, I'm seriously thinking of moving it into its own WhizFolder.

In the screenshot at the top of this post you can see two of the WhizFolders. One is atop the other. Mobile Hopes's window is seen entire with it's topic list to the left and one topic window open to the right. The topic list is nested and most of the 'nests' are closed so that only the most senior parent topic is visible. Peeking out to the left of that you see the topic list for Spring Fever which was/is one of the messiest of all the story files. WhizNote did not allow for nesting the topic list nor for color coding the topic names so when I first opened Spring Fever this week it was one very long list of some 250 topics. I've added nearly another hundred this week!

Of course, the majority of the topics are not scene work but rather research. And some of that research has gotten so involved that I think I need to move it out into separate WhizFolders. After all much of it will be useful for other projects. Below you can see where I've opened the section for Tarot and the topic window shows the topic for the FOOL card with a thumbnail image of the Rider-Waite Fool card. There is a topic for every card in the Rider-Waite deck and I'm well on the way to doing the same for three other decks. The reason I need all the info for four decks at hand is that each of four characters is associated with a different deck.

Tarot is a major theme of this novel. Its 22 chapters are each themed with a different Major Arcana card. Time is also a huge theme in the story and all the things culture attaches to the concept of time--seasons, calendars, planets, constellations, clocks, birthdays and anniversaries, schedules and so forth. One character, Graham, is a professor who teaches Dante's works in Italian to Grad Students. The music and stage choreography and costuming for Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring are importat to the story. Three characters are drummers--three different drumming traditions--Amer Indian; Symphonic Percussion; Modern Rock and Jazz. Because each major character is from a mixed ethnic and religious background, comparative religion, mythology, and ethnic traditions--rituals, clothing, food, etc.

You begin to get the picture as to why I've been so shy of opening this file since early last year.. It was daunting. I knew what a mess I had made of it as I tried to collect research info and write scenes at a NaNo pace in 2007.


Below is a screenshot of WhizNote with the FOS Worksheet topic list showing in the center and topic windows from one of my stories on the right and one with a list of jump links to the other stories appearing on the left. WhizNote had its own desktop that could grow horizontally and vertically as long as you were willing to use the scroll bars to get back to the topic you were working on. I kind of liked that feature and it is the only one eliminated by the upgrade that I miss.

The screenshot below shows the work I did today to organize the WhizFolders for FOS Worksheets and the FOS novel, The Substance of Things Hoped For, aka Faye's story. The topic window on the right shows the spreadsheet that maps the scenes of Crystal's story, Home Is Where the Horror Is.

The last screenshot shows the FOS Worksheet with the Timeline and Roster lists open. Both are barely begun. I don't try to make them comprehensive only record the relevant info as I discover it while working with the stories. The roster would probably be a couple hundred strong if every minor character is included. The timeline will eventually cover WW I to the present and probably beyond.

I learned the necessity of keeping track of these things in a central location after writing a scene in which one character made a comment about another character that implied that she had known him in school but when I worked out their age difference it was greater than seven so unless there were unusual circumstances or their acquaintance originated off school campus that comment could not stand and yet I needed it to in some form.

Topic names in the list can be moved up and down the list to where you want them. One major wish I have for future upgrades for WhizFolder is the ability to automatically sort a section of a topic list by alphabetical, time or number sequences. Like a database. But since it is not using database technology I don't know how that could work.


I'm hoping I'll be inspired to write actuall fiction scenes soon. But I'm not holding my breath. While I'm here helping out with my Mom, I can't count on enough of that quality quiet time without threat of interruption that I crave for story writing--for getting lost in the story dream. But I am learning to make use of odd spaces of time as well as odd nooks and crannies of Mom's house to get small to medium tasks done or at least begun. These organizing tasks are easy to fit into such odd moments that can't be planned for. They can be interrupted without too much damage to them and picked up again without too much fluster.

For more on Whiz and what it can do see this post I did shortly after the upgrade last February. I'm sure I included a link to the WhizFolder site in it somewhere.

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