It's all messed up

Not the zombies, but my head. Spring is here, and I'm stoned out of my gourd from simply breathing the moldy air. Damned IU. Make me work in a building that's full of toxic mold, then give me crap when I get sick from it. AND I've got permanent injuries, which is what I consider being OUT OF IT for weeks twice a year. Didn't used to have allergies.

Still no title, but Birdie was having fun goofing on it this morning. She suggested "They're Not Really Dead!" at one point.

One of the major problems I've had with writing in the past is organizing. I get bollixed up and can't get things worked out, and forget things. Something Kate insisted on is that I have an OUTLINE completed along with the first three chapters.

See, that's the whole deal. I took this semester off from school because I was going to get serious and write that CGUS (Coast Guard Universal Service) story/screenplay/novel (whatever it turned into) rather than take classes. But of course I got bogged down in a ton of (really fascinating) research and pretty much gave it up as a lost cause. Again. So Kate stepped in and twisted my arm practically off.

And now I'm getting into the outlining, after making the mistake AGAIN of trying to write without an outline and floundering in a sea of ideas which change (and get much better with age). I wrote about a chapter and a half, but I was getting things screwed up and beginning to concentrate on fixing what I'd already written, rather than just getting on with it...

Crap! Same old shit. And I chose a zombie novel because I thought it would be EASY, and FUN, which should have kept me writing. One of my other writing problems is losing interest in my current project or allowing a new idea to take over from the old. If I'm ENJOYING writing, Kate says, maybe I'll continue with it. So far she's been right, but then the outlining was beginning to kick my butt.

What format should I use, I asked her, and she gave me a kind of vague answer. I thanked her (because that information was useful - apparently there's no "formal" outline style for a novel) and went on-line to try and figure out how to do this. So there I am, getting bogged down AGAIN in research, when one of the reasons I'm doing a zombie novel is because you don't need a ton of RESEARCH. But novels are new to me, and I'm understanding, finally, how important the outline is.

So I stumbled on a format that seems to be working really well for me. Bullets, ironically enough. Each scene is a bullet, and there should be, what, about 60 scenes in the book, give or take? Then all I need to do is expand on each bullet and viola!

This is working great, so far. It's allowing me to take a quick glance at my cheat sheet and know what I need to push the plot forward. The expanded pages will be what I send Kate in a couple more weeks.