Well I somehow managed to get 100 Twitter followers without having a damned clue how, but it was a lovely little milestone that made me smile. Speaking of which, I have now joined the ranks of the #2amwritersclub and #5amwritersclub thanks to the little man. Helped me pop in some extra words yesterday and keep the ball rolling!

As the title alludes to, I feel that I am now lining up the ducks to get things done. I am writing (here, on Twitter and actually on my WIP) and also managing to bring into play a range of tools to help track what I am doing, need to do and want to do from an aspirational standpoint. So, what exactly am I doing? Well, I use mind mapping to hammer down ideas and block things out for one. There are great free ones out there like Coggle or Ayoa, but I use MindNode (iOS/Mac I’m afraid) and it has been an absolute godsend.

With a mind map I can get down ideas, related thoughts or details and group them together – perfect for world building or plotting. I’ve clustered countries, regions, magic systems. Little notes and thoughts all get to roll together. It’s fantastic. But the temptation is always there to world build instead of write, so I’m being careful now that I am building momentum again!

To stay organised I also created a Todoist board to help me focus on the background things I need to do, like research, editing and querying and also to put in recurring writing tasks. The awesome thing about Todoist is that it’s on all platforms, so I can update it on the laptop, iPad or phone and it will sync perfectly. Also useful to remind me to take the bins out or order the shopping.

Pulling it all together gives me a nice little suite of tools that I can use. But I would be interested to know, what tools do you use to keep yourselves on track and keep writing? I’m always interested in something better than what I’ve found currently works for me.

With all the planning, writing and everything else, I’ve somehow managed to find time to eyeball a couple of short story competitions with reasonable windows that I could submit to as well, so that would be wonderful if I managed to pull that off and get featured. And Camp NaNoWriMo is coming up for April as well! I will definitely be going for that.

Lastly, for those going for #PitMad this quarter: GOOD LUCK!

See you tomorrow.