Over the past few months, I have been writing more and more. Working on my goal of reading a book a week is very inspiring, and every story that I finish gives me so many ideas for stories I might create myself. The only trouble is organizing all those ideas into a way that I can easily work on them. Organization groupie that I am, I decided to come up with a fun method to make it a little more efficient.
I know lots of people like to write on a computer, but I tend not to work well that way. I get frustrated with the fact that my words never sound quite right the first time I put them down on paper and wind up deleting the whole thing. I needed a writing method that was less conducive to instant deletion.
The last time I visited my favorite Portland art suppy store, I found just the thing I needed. I bought a set of Stabilo colored pens to color code my creative writing notebook. I use a red pen for a story about Snow White (inspired by a crazy nightmare about a neighbor), purple for a story about demons, and black for a story about Lydia (naturally). This way, no matter what I feel like working on, I can easily find all my previous notes and continue my writing.
At the moment, I feel pretty far from ready to send any of my work to publishers, but I am excited (and extremely nervous) about the prospect of publication. With my work nicely organized, I know I can just keep plugging along until my stories are ready to meet the world.