#WritingWednesday – On Using your resources effectively

As I sit down to write this blog post, or at least the first draft of it, I’m on a lunch hour at my new day job (more on that in a future post, I expect).  I’m sitting at my desk thinking already on the ‘meta’ nature of this thought process.  My smart phone stares back up at me, my dual screen computer is within reach, my iPod is on the other side of my desk, and even my laptop is in it’s case at my feet.  Yet, as I write this, all of my electronics sit idle.

Writing in long hand feels much different than typing it out on a keyboard (Even though it has obviously been  transcribed into wordpress).  It feels more intimate, more personal, and I an already feel the change in tone between this post and many of my previous posts.

I had intended to do some brainstorming on this notepad.  I had planed to flesh out the barebones story that is Hunter, do some world building for another Slipspace title, or something else entirely.  But as I did, I realized that I still lack a good central source for my universe bibles.  I’ve played with various wiki platforms, I’ve put a private self hosted wiki online behind password protection, but no matter how many times I try, I inevitably fall short somewhere for some reason.  I do want to build a fleshed out database system for my universes, so the idea of a centralized Wiki, seems to make logical sense.

But in my search for the latest and greatest wiki platform, one that I could export to Scrivener, the software I use to draft my books, I realized one very obvious truth.

Scrivener is a wiki unto itself

Understand, this is not a promotion of Scrivener.  But rather, this is the realization that the solution I have been seeking has been right under my nose this entire time.  I had been so focused on finding the latest and greatest, that I lost sight of the resources I clearly had available to me.

And therein lays the moral of this story.  Whether you’re writing, or working on a different project, or anything where you might be looking for the new tool to make your process that much more effective, don’t overlook the resources you already have at your disposal.  Perhaps you have something in your toolbelt that you’ve been using, but perhaps haven’t been using to it’s fullest.  In my case I remember looking at Scrivener’s tutorials and seeing the notes about it’s ability to cross reference items and pull in various pieces of multimedia.  I remember looking at that and saying “hmm… that’d be fun to play with”.  But I never got to it and eventually I pigenholed the software into the role I had given to it.  How many of you have done that?  So go back… look at your process and the tools you use.  Are there any ways you can streamline it down by making better use of the tools you have and potentially remove redundancies?

So, thus begins the longer term project to pull together the three story bibles across six different full length novels, a short story, and other snippets.  Never before have these threads been fully consolidated, but once they are and I have the Slipspace Bible, the Codename Ciris Bible, and the Hunter Bible, I sense good things coming along.

I’ll keep you all in the loop as things progress and there will be writing and production updates coming in the next few days.

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