Bad Bad Sybir
First off. BAD SYBIR. I should be posting at least 2x a week. My excuse? I’ve been WRITING! Yes, you heard me. I’ve been hard at work on Book 3 of the Elemental Goddess Series and Lady Glacial, Goddess of Water has been making me work for my 20 pages a day goal. Now, some days I make that goals, some days I don’t…but at least, I’m always moving forward.
It helps that small child is back in school FT and on schedule this week. I’ve found it REALLY hard to write with iCarly going in the background. Anyone wonder why?
Back to writing….Candace Havens is running an online workshop called “Fast Draft” and oh, by the way, only a few more days to visit your local bookstore and snag TAKE ME IF YOU DARE. (Hot contemporary…you will love it.) She’s teaching us, pretty much in the style of Nanowrimo to shut your internal editor up and just write.
Something I truly needed with this book because it started out soooo hard to begin with.
But the object of this post was not Fast Drafts, I just wanted to give you some insight as to how I reached this next step. By being on book 3, some of the timelines, world-building and histories are starting to blend together in my mind. I need some way to track it OTHER THAN PAPER….and some way to quickly search it (MS is failing miserably in the helpful realm here). So, Scrivener, as I’ve mentioned before (and now converted most of my writer friends to) is a big help…but not across books. i.e., world-building. (Of course I may be wrong, I’m STILL learning things about the software!)
Enter a post from my friend Charles at Celtic Wolf. He was blogging about Wikis. Now, if you don’t know Wikipedia (you’re not living online like the rest of us 
) – it is pretty much a user built online encyclopedia. I was reading 1) because he sent me the link and asked me to read and 2) because once I was reading I kept thinking, how can I use this?
And then, lightbulb! Dokuwiki can be set to PRIVATE….I could keep track of my goddesses, my planets, my alien races, my mythology, EVERYTHING behind a secure log in and really help myself not lose my readers OR myself. Hot Damn! Now, you do have to be a little tech savvy to know what to do like uploading it to your webserver and then setting it up…and the creation of a new page isn’t right there in your face, but the documentation is very straight forward.
It took me about 10 minutes, not counting waiting for the files to upload.
And now? Now, I can keep track of my worlds, search on them, have it all online so I can reach it from wherever I am. So yes, I may be bad Sybir for not posting, but really, when I find gems like this to share??
