GETTING YOUR (WRITING) HOUSE IN ORDER by ALISON STUART

This week we have author Alison Stuart with a writing craft post of 'Getting Your Writing House In Order'.

ABOUT ALISON STUART

Award winning Australian author, Alison Stuart learned her passion from history from her father. She has been writing stories since her teenage years but it was not until 2007 that her first full

length novel was published. Alison has now published 6 full length historical romances and a collection of her short stories.  Her disposition for writing about soldier heroes may come from her varied career as a lawyer in the military and fire services. These days when she is not writing she is travelling and routinely drags her long suffering husband around battlefields and castles.

Connect with Alison at her website, Facebook, Twitter and Goodreads.

GETTING YOUR (WRITING) HOUSE IN ORDER

I am by nature a fairly tidy person – a place for everything and everything in its place, as my mother would say. That and an education in Feng Shui ensured that in order for the good ‘qi’ to flow I needed some method to the madness of writing books.

Anyone who follows me will know I am by nature an organic writer (or pantser).  My books tend to evolve by a method of trial and error rather than good management but the more books I write the more I needed some sort of system to manage my research, my drafts, character information etc.

I by and large solved this problem when I discovered Scrivener. I am a devotee of SCRIVENER. The important thing to remember about Scrivener is that it is a project management system. Within the project I can file not only my manuscript but research – direct links to websites, photograph, text documents can all be neatly filed and stored. Details about characters can also be systematically filed in the one place. Problem solved…

For transporting my Work in Progress between computers, I use DROPBOX.

Image management. Now and then I come across an image that exemplifies my work in progress. For each book I create a Pinterest Board (The Pinterest Board for THE KING’S MAN is HERE) . This serves the double purpose of preserving the image for me but also provides a Pinterest Board to share with readers – all of the book pages on my website have the widget referring them to the Pinterest site. Visit my Pinterest Boards by clicking HERE

Then there is the ‘business’ of being writer. For every blog post you write, you have to provide the same details about your book – blurb, cover, buy links, your links etc. I started off with a Word

document file but as my back list grew the document became unmanageable. It was driving me crazy until I discovered Microsoft ONE NOTE (downloadable for free what’s more!).  Every book has its own Notebook and within that Notebook there are separate pages for Cover and Blurb/ Links/ Excerpts/ Promo etc. (whatever you like). There is also a page for me with my bios (short/long/humourous etc) and links, along with the embed code or URL for every widget or author page I have scattered across the web.

Finally blogs and reviews. I write a lot of blogs for 3^rd parties and I also like to keep a track of reviews for books as they go up on 3^rd party websites. So for this I use EVERNOTE.  Which is similar to One Note and in point of fact I could probably just use the one piece of software but I think they both offer different usability that suits the purpose to which I have put them.

The beauty of both Evernote and One Note is the ability to clip directly from the website.  For example a recent review of THE KING’S MAN appeared on RBH. With the web page open, all I need to do is clip the Evernote elephant on the tool bar of my web browser and I can save it as a full page, a bookmark or (my preference) a simplified article directly to the relevant file in Evernote.  And best of all, they are Cloud based so it doesn’t matter where I am or what computer I am using I have instant access to my work.

We are all different (my husband for example, will not go near ‘the Cloud’). These are the tools I have found to help me keep my writing house in order. What do you use?

Alison’s latest release THE KING’S MAN

The second in a tantalising trilogy from award-winning author Alison Stuart, about warriors, the wounds they carry, and the women that help them heal.

London 1654: Kit Lovell is one of the King’s men, a disillusioned Royalist who passes his time cheating at cards, living off his wealthy and attractive mistress, and plotting the death of Oliver Cromwell.

Penniless and friendless, Thamsine Granville has lost everything.  Terrified, in pain, and alone, she hurls a piece of brick at the coach of Oliver Cromwell, and earns herself an immediate death sentence. Only the quick thinking of a stranger saves her.

Far from the bored, benevolent rescuer that he seems, Kit plunges Thamsine into his world of espionage and betrayal – a world that has no room for falling in love.

Torn between Thamsine and loyalty to his master and King, Kit’s carefully constructed web of lies begins to unravel. He must make one last desperate gamble – the cost of which might be his life.

BUY THE KING’S MAN:  AMAZON, iBooks, and where all good Ebooks are sold (see Escape Publishing for the full list)

TO CELEBRATE THE LAUNCH OF THE KING’S MAN, ALISON IS GIVING AWAY A KINDLE EREADER TO A LUCKY READER. CLICK HERE TO ENTER THE RAFFLECOPTER CONTEST.