Daily Tao ☯ 6.28.17
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“After the writer’s death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter.”
Interesting creative day today. Reworked a scene that’s been bothering me in the manuscript, then dealt with a lingering annoyance. I’ve had a To Do on my Wunderlist for a few months called “Create a mental inventory.” I don’t know why lunch today became the moment to tackle this, but tackle it I did. You see, I’ve been offloading ideas as they happen into my Day One journal, but I’d neglected to mark any of them in a specific (read searchable) way. Well, now they are. Thirteen solid, doable, interesting story ideas, all coded and tagged so I can pull them up at a moment’s notice. And offloaded, and backed up, and printed out.
Maybe it was the malware attack that launched yesterday, maybe it was some weird premonition that my computer might freak out, but I knew I needed to do this immediately. I feel much, much better now. (Hello, OCD.)
I used to write these ideas down in a notebook, but with the advent of Day One, which syncs across all my devices, being able to access this anywhere is too cool, and so it became my go to for story creation.
I blog in it, too. I actually have entries dating back to 2004. You know what that first post is? My first major rejection, by a leading NY editor, on the book that 12 years later was published as FIELD OF GRAVES. (Awww… admittedly, poor kid J.T. was pretty well crushed that day.)
It’s kind of nice to be able to look back and see this, and know that things were soon to change. It took another year, but things did pick up. And here we are now, a career underway, more ideas than I have time to write. Pretty cool.
I have to admit, though, when I opened Day One to do today’s blog, I was a bit shocked to see the weird quote at the beginning of the blog. It’s true, absolutely. These daily entires,my daily devotions, whether I share them online or keep them private, really are a love letter, left behind.
On that note, sweet dreams — and be sure to come by the blog tomorrow for some fun news!
