Exploration

I think I blogged about Oz remaining secretive about himself, but I was sure I knew Ayla, his heroine, fairly well. It's not that I didn't know Oz at all--I most definitely know enough--but he's staying quiet about his background.

I know he can be manipulative (poor Lurch), but it's always for the greater good, not for any malicious purpose. It's part of why he was sent undercover with the drug lord.

He's still not sharing his background. Either that means there's nothing there or it means there's something major he doesn't want me to know. IIRC about blogging about this, I'm sure I mentioned talking to his friends and that none of them would share information either.

That's super strange. Whenever I have a character who won't talk, their friends will usually share so that they can have their happily ever after.

But that's not what I wanted to talk about today.

No matter how well I think I know my characters, writing is an exploration of who they really are, and things come up that I never knew about before I wrote the scene where they reveal something of themselves.

As an example, Ayla in Wicked Ambition. She didn't tell me that she's afraid of flying. It never occurred to me that she'd have this phobia since she hopped on a jet and flew nine hours from Los Angeles to Puerto Jardin to rescue her sister.

And then I wrote the scene where Oz is asking her why she didn't fly from the Puerto Jardinese capital to the city of Trujillo.

That's when I found out about her fear.

I don't know if this is a big deal later in the book or not. It did drive plot in the beginning of the story and (so far at least) it hasn't come up again. I'll find out as I keep writing.

Not Quite the Scale I Wanted

I have a thing about numbers. My eyes kind of go right past them without really registering what they are. I've always been number challenged and usually I compensate for it by going back and forcing myself to reread them more slowly.

Yeah. I didn't do that this time while online shopping.

I saw the picture, made an assumption, and I'm not sure I did more than glance at the item's description. I know I didn't pay any attention to numbers. Heck, maybe I didn't even read the description. This might have been a full-on assumption on my part.

The Dodgers (my team even though I grew up with the Minnesota Twins) won the world series and I wanted to pick up some merchandise to celebrate. I saw stickers and my eyes lit up. These would be perfect to put on or in my planner!

Um, not quite. (I put an envelope on top to show the scale)

These stickers/decals are HUGE!

I knew something weird was going on when the post office left a box at the door on the day the stickers were supposed to arrive. We have a group mailbox. My post office literally will never come to my door if they have a chance in hell of avoiding it.

My puzzlement grew when I saw this enormous box, a box far too large to fit in the group mailbox's parcel locker, outside my door. How strange, I thought, as I brought it inside. My prevailing theory was that maybe they ran out of boxes. Or maybe the other item I ordered was with the stickers and they forgot to put it on the shipping notice.

And then I opened the box and saw the stickers--decals--filling up nearly the entire bottom of the box.

I like the stickers, but I'm trying to figure out how to use them. Maybe on my laptop case? Two of the stickers might be too large even for that.

Journal Prompts and Journaling

One thing I see over and over in some of the planner communities I'm in is people posting either 1) asking how you fill a blank page when you want to journal or 2) saying how they buy these tiny-sized planners because they can't journal enough to fill an A5.

Um? Maybe it's because I'm a writer and I'm always facing a blank page, but it never even occurred to me to get locked up over journaling.

Journaling is like stream of consciousness as far as I'm concerned, and it's never taken much effort to barf it all out onto the page.

What's hard is telling a coherent story complete with character arcs, a suspense plot, a romance, and tying it all into the series the book is part of. :-)

I spent the last four months or so, maybe five months, of 2024 journaling in a B6 because it was one of my 2024 planners, and I wanted all the empty pages filled by the end of the year. I just bullet pointed parts of my day or thoughts I had.

Also, I have never in all my life seen so many people put their grocery lists in their planner until I joined larger planner groups. Why wouldn't you just download the store's app and put your list in that? It's easier to bring my phone to the store and the app will tell me exactly where my item is located. Dragging a planner to the store and not knowing that capers are on aisle 6 boggles my brain.

I literally always have my phone within reach and it's a simple thing to add an item to my app's grocery list. It also tells me if the item is on sale, something my planner definitely won't do.

And while I frequently cart my small planner around with me, my bigger planner stays on my desk, so it's not as if it's remotely convenient to add grocery items to it. Grocery list in planner just strikes me as incredibly inefficient. My goal is to get in and out of the grocery store as quickly as possible. I don't want to be wandering the aisles and going back and forth searching for something.

Um, anyway, journal prompts are helpful for blank pages. One of the best sites for journal prompts (IMO) is: TheCoffeeMonsterzCo. Some of the prompts are light and fun, some are more serious, but it's nice to have a mix and not a constant stream of heavy-work prompts.

Time Tracking

In 2024, I was diagnosed with ADHD and suddenly my entire struggle made a lot more sense. I didn't suck at being an adult, I was operating in hard mode without realizing it. I watched a number of videos with experts giving life hacks for ADHD and discovered I already did all those things.

An example was create a station, a one-stop shop, so to speak. One of my stations is for coffee. Everything I need to brew a pot is right there. Everything I need to create my actual cup of coffee is right there.

I needed more tips and tricks. After doing some thinking on the matter, I came up with a multi-pronged solution I wanted to test out. It's likely pieces of it won't work and I'll have to go back to the drawing board, but I'm hoping at least some of it sticks.

Now that we're in 2025, I'm going to share some pieces of my new system for keeping myself on track.

Item one: Time tracking.

A very real problem I have is what I call time drift. I think only a few minutes has gone by, but it's much, much longer than that. I thought what if I kept myself accountable by recording what I'm doing in half an hour increments?

I bought a set of two booklets for 2025. One is January through June and the other is July through December. (Volume one is pictured above.) This is Traveler's Notebook size, but I don't have them in any kind of cover. Each volume has a vertical column with time blocks.

I hope that by making myself write down what I'm doing, that this will nip time drift in the bud. There's nothing worse than thinking ten minutes have gone by and realizing I've wasted two hours.

I'll post an update on how this is working, maybe when I finish the first booklet.

Change for 2025

I like bright colors. If you don't need sunglasses to look at it, it's not bright enough! :-)

This color aesthetic has included the colors of pens I use in my planners. I've been using purple ink to write and crossing off my completed items with neon pink highlighter. The colors of the tabs I use to mark pages I need to refer to are bright, and so is anything else you can name.

For 2025 I've decided to move to a neutral color palette. This is where the shocked face comes in.

I'm not sure why I made this decision. Maybe it has something to do with moving into a completely different planner than I've used for the last eight or nine years. Maybe I just need something different to be excited about. Maybe it was just time for a change.

That's part of the reason for the pen tests. I'm using a .5 mm burgundy pen in my mulberry-colored weekly planner. I have a brown pen and an olive pen, and of course, a pen with black ink. My highlighter color is called Chai Latte and it's the perfect shade of brown. I even have dot markers in neutrals like gray, beige, and pale earthy green.

There's no time frame for how long I use these colors. At least through 2025 because I'd hate to switch up mid-year, but after that? Shrug. Who knows?

I am very excited by this change, so it's pretty clear I was bored with the old colors. Sometimes, we just need to change things up.