Long Term Planning - They're More Like Guidelines

Warning. Genre quotes whiplash ahead.

I approach Long Term Planning (tm) in the spirit of the Pirates of the Caribbean. You recall the scene. Elizabeth has been captured by the crew of the Black Pearl. She attempts to bargain with Barbossa, quoting the pirate code. It doesn't work out.

Long term planning is Elizabeth. I'm the undead pirate (some days deader than others.)

Yeah, yeah. I know. I handled data for a living. Damn it, Jim, I was a SQL DBA not a project manager! You might think I ought to give you screenshots of my exquisitely sorted (indexed, with prime and foreign keys!) data of my long term planning.

You'd be wrong. This is where I channel Barbossa and growl, "The code is more what you'd call guidelines than actual rules."

Long term planning spreadsheets, color-coded and cell-linked are enough like rules to make me want to gouge out my eyes with my pen. I am so glad several people posted shots of their planning spreadsheets for you, and I am honestly pleased those constructs work for them. For me, they're soul and creative impulse crushing. Don't know why. Don't much care why. I only care that they ARE. So I don't do 'em. Won't have 'em. I am apparently not wired to work in that fashion.

Instead, I stick to the guidelines. Of course, I still plan. I absolutely keep track of what I want and what I'm doing to move in that direction. Just - differently. Thus the really, really old school list you see above. Crappy photo on purpose. There are somethings that aren't yet ready for the light of day, even as half-baked ideas.

The handwritten lists mature into other formats and get attached to target dates and Bullet Journal short goals and long goals. No. I won't photograph a Bullet Journal page for anyone else's consumption. I practice NSFW Bullet Journaling and we run a marginally family-friendly blog here, so we'll all be happier without that image preserved for internet posterity. The cats get to see my pages, but they don't judge. Well. Not my Bullet Journal, anyway.

Here's the moral of my disjointed story - it's easy to get wrapped up in thinking there's a right way to do long term planning. And maybe there is a right way. The Right Way for YOU. If you are a linear, analytical thinker, detailed spreadsheets may give you all kinds of creative energy and drive. Yay! If you're a spatial, relational thinker, you're going to be driven to drink by those same spreadsheets simply because your brain works differently. Your tools for long term planning will be no less rigorous, no less valid. But they will likely be much harder to screen shot. Just remember to honor the system that turns on your lights. That's the right one.

Twists, Turns, Dangling Threads

Y'all. I'm phoning this in. Straight up. Dangling threads. Long series. Plot arcs. Right now, the dangling thread is an apartment so empty it echoes. The overarching plot is the work of getting my folks and their cat out of Washington State and down here with us. This series has been airing daily now for MONTHS with new twists and turns every damn day. 

Today's twist - the moving truck was delivered to the storage unit I had to find on short notice. Tomorrow at a time when most people are still asleep, a bunch of strangers I hired will show up to throw everything off the truck into the storage unit. Mind you. It took four people 10 days to load that truck. I fear for my life and for my breakables.

The OTHER twist is that someone has to fly Nicadeimos (Mom's cat) to Florida. Either I have to hop a plane to Seattle and collect Mr. Tuxedo, or one of my folks has to fly down and bring him to me and then fly back so they can finish up the house sale and then drive across country (to SEE things, they say) in freaking November.

Do you know how I handle all of these details and dangling threads? With a Bullet Journal. And in fiction, each book in a series has a notebook. This notebook is spiral bound and gets filled with notes about eye colors, names, places, things, editorial notes, scene notes - just everything. But after the book is done, while the novel is out for edits, my notes get munged into a spreadsheet for the series. Every ship name. Every planet. Every single detail that matters end up in that spreadsheet. Behold: The Series Bible.

Authors are weird. I cop to that. And we all have our bugaboos. Continuity is mine. Would anyone else notice it if I screwed up a detail? Probably. But unless it was major, I could probably count the number of people who noticed on one hand. BUT I WOULD NOTICE AND I WOULD NEVER SLEEP AGAIN. 

So I keep track. Am I organized? No. Am I thorough? Oh, yes. Oh very much yes. Because the sanity at stake is my own. And that's already only so/so. 

For my series to work or me, they have to follow a set order of precedence. Series arc rules everything. Each novel must serve the series arc while containing it's own arc. Each character must have an arc within each novel in which they appear and all of those arcs must serve the series arc in some way. 

Strangely enough, I find it doesn't matter where I start in the process of figuring out arcs. It's very chicken and egg. All that matters is that I start somewhere figuring out arcs and the rest emerge. Easy to say. Harder to do. Each book and each character likes to escape control just little bit. So it doesn't always go as planned.

And now, I'm taking this weary author off to sleep so she can face a day of schlepping boxes and heavy things without ending the day either in the emergency room or in prison.

Keep reading.