Writing goals for 2010

For the past several months I’ve been attending an awesome weekly writing workshop hosted by Ami Hendrickson. It’s been a huge help in seeing the flaws in my writing and improving them. She also gives us all sorts of help with the non-creative, but just as vital, aspects of writing. For the past month or so she has been after us to write down our writing goals for the coming year. She even got us all little calendar booklets to make sure we put it in writing.

I don’t always think well with a calendar. I do better with a blank sheet of paper (or the electronic equivalent). Today, quite by chance someone on the Absolute Write board mentioned a Microsoft tool called OneNote. I’d never heard of it, but came to find out I’ve had it installed on my laptop since day one. Duh! It’s a standard part of Office 2007 and you can also get it as a stand-alone item.

Never one to ignore a new time waster useful gadget, I immediately set up a new “notebook” in it, created tabs for my goals for this year, and inside each tab, created several pages.

One of the tabs is for my historical novel and I was able to take nearly twenty separate documents I had (.doc, .pdf, .xls, etc.) and move all that information into my OneNote notebook. I now have a page for goals (things like, revisit my characters and make them better, complete the draft, start editing), a page for info on the 1920s (when my story is set), a page for pictures of fashions from back then, a page with a floor plan of the house the story takes place in, a page for a scene-by-scene outline, and bio pages for each of my characters.

Now, instead of sorting through twenty documents and wasting time trying remember where exactly I put that little piece of information, I can just click on a tab and boom – there it is. I LOVE it! Can you tell?

I don’t know if this will make me a better writer, but I’m sure it will make me more productive. Now I feel like I’m ready to get cracking on 2010!