Roll Music: “Wake My Soul” from Chris Tomlin
Work is underway for the next project. This takes place in a fictitious island nation in the Caribbean and involves an insurrection the locals don’t really care about. The idea stems from an idea while in grad school, “What if someone threw a war and no one came.”
Currently, the project is working its way through the world-building and the story outline. Normally, my outlines involve a collection of index cards with specific scenes scribbled out on individual cards. Yes, in some cases this ends up quite the stack of cards, and quite the mess across the kitchen counter as sequences are developed and chapters are built. Hey, don’t judge, this is a technique most comfortable for me. Consequently, there are unopened packs and loose index cards all over the house (you never know when and where inspiration will hit).
In the days this new project began to bubble up in my head I came across an app for my iPad called “Index Card,” and decided to give it a test run using this project. Wow. This app provides more advantages to the traditional paper cards, travels with me in the iPad, and, more importantly, less of a mess in the kitchen. The biggest advantage is its capability to export the finished (or unfinished) product into Scrivener, which is the program used to write the actual novel.
Roll Music: “Happy Trails” from Quicksilver Messenger Service
It makes me happy when this ole dog learns new tricks and there’s shifts to the paradigms of life. But, in full disclosure, there are moments where I miss the old house of cards, and even the times when Scotty the Cairn came running through the layout to topple the carefully build chapters and scatter the smooth rhythm of the story line. Okay, so maybe that part I don’t miss. It’s that moment of his hound dog craziness that helps to reassure me the electronic Index Cards is the truly smart way to go…or at least until my Cairn figures out how to use an iPad.
Comstock Writer 