Category: General

  • My novel project template for Notion

    My novel project template for Notion

    As many of you are likely aware by now, I’m a touch obsessed with Notion. As such, I have obviously made a template for how I do my writing projects now! It’s something that works really well for me so far, and here it is!

    To start with, the set up to do list. I think I could have a lot of this auto-populated for each story, but I find it is useful to intentionally create each item just so that I am thinking about all of these things.
    Underneath that, of course, is the pitch! This is intended to be the elevator pitch of the story. ((Which is something that I struggle with immensely))

    Next we have the board! I have a few other tabs for the calendar and any key documents that also pull out of the same list of things, but I work mostly out of the Kanban board. This is where I’ll put all of those checklist items and continue to add things as I need them.

    And, of course, I’m starting to think a lot more about marketing for upcoming projects. Trying. I’ll try to put together three comp titles for each project, as well as trying to think about who the ideal readers might be. This helps to figure out how to write things like the Listing information and also helps to determine what the marketing strategy might also be.

    I also have a table for Audience groups. This is relatively new, but I’m using it to try and determine if I could direct people who liked one series to another when they are done!

    Lastly, we have finances! Not only am I trying to keep track of the products that will come out of this series ((The books and anything else that might be related!)) but also what the expenses might be. Expenses are things like editing or art assets.

    And that’s basically how I keep track of it! Do you have a method to keep track of your projects?

  • Why I’m drop shipping most of my products

    Why I’m drop shipping most of my products

    I’ve been making a ton of updates to the shop and you may have noticed there are a lot of external links now! Which might seem odd, but let me explain.

    There is one main reason for this: Canadian shipping rates.

    If you are in Canada you likely already know about this, but it costs more than any of the items in my shop just to ship something to someone even just down the street from me. It is absolutely ridiculous and I cannot afford to keep prices reasonable and expect anyone who wants something from me to be not shocked at discovering a $25 charge to ship. It’s not fair to you.

    Given that I just design most products, I do have third parties that can ship items at a much better rate! Art of Where, most book retailers, even Redbubble can all offer much better shipping rates than I can hope to get access to.

    That’s not to say everything is going to be done by a third party! Obviously, signed paperbacks will still be coming from me, and anything that is not created and made to order. The jewelry, the charms, the zines, all still coming directly from me.

    Just know that these updates are very intentional and being done for the purpose of making sure you’re not paying double what you expect just so that it gets shipped to you.

  • My life as a research project: Discovery

    My life as a research project: Discovery

    1. Revising my life
    2. My life as a research project: Discovery
    3. My life as a research project: Hypothesis and metrics
    4. My life as a research project: The first project

    So, it’s been about a month since I started looking at my life as a research project. It’s a daunting thing, because my life is full of all kinds of different aspects, so where do you even start with figuring out how to make it into whatever its ideal state is? What is ideal, anyway?

    Luckily, I am no stranger to exploratory research! This is how I started.

    Research

    Naturally, I started off with a list of questions I wanted to ask about myself as I am now and what I think would make me happy. I put a couple questions down, each on a separate sheet of paper, and left them by where I eat (When I don’t eat at my desk) so that I could answer them when I was taking some down time during the day. I left some fun pens so and did this over the course of two weeks so I could do this when I was having different kinds of day and in different moods with different perspectives.

    The questions I started with were:

    • What does is an ideal life?
    • What is a perfect day?
    • What do I like?

    There were others, but these were the ones I found were the most useful.

    Finding trends

    At the end of the two weeks, I wrote all of the things I wrote down onto post it notes ((In Miro, because I am in tech and for whatever reason tech companies always seem to use Miro these days)) and started to group the ideas together.

    You may notice that there are a lot of things that fall between groups. That is pretty normal, but I didn’t force these ones into one group or another. Sometimes one thing is meaningful for many things!

    From these groups, I could figure out a series of areas of life that I found important. For me this is:

    • Environment
    • Experiences
    • Physical health
    • Mental health
    • Day to day
    • Creative freedom
    • Money
    • Relationships
    • Pets

    Next steps

    I also came up with a few initial next steps we can cover in the coming months:

    • Refining the areas
    • Determining the current status of these areas
    • Finding metrics
    • Creating some hypotheses
  • 6 questions to ask before you pick up that new hobby

    6 questions to ask before you pick up that new hobby

    I collect hobbies. I write, garden, make jewelry and bottle charms, fold paper stars, design artwork, bake, all sorts of things. I’ve dabbled in resin making, used to dance, sometimes pick up making games, and am currently deep into determining how far I’m going to go into Notion.

    If you also collect hobbies to the point where you are getting overwhelmed, here’s a quick checklist to go through before you app another one to the list!

    New hobby checklist

    1. Have you slept on it? A new hobby can seem really exciting in the moment, but give yourself a little time to think about it and see if the motivation continues.
    2. Do you have the time for it? There is usually some kind of time commitment involved, whether that is taking classes or learning or even actually doing this hobby! Make sure it fits in with the rest of your life. As a tangent to this, if you are doing this with other people, do your schedules match up? Arranging things gets trickier the more people are involved, and you will want to make sure your schedules are compatible.
    3. Do you have the capacity for it? Make sure adding this isn’t going to completely overwhelm you. Even if you have the time to take that extra class, make sure you have the mental space to do it as well!
    4. Can you do a cheap trial run of it? New hobbies can be expensive. If you don’t know if you’ll like it, see if you can try it out without a huge cost investment first. Get a trial subscription, get a dollar store version of the art supplies, something to make sure this is something you want to do.
    5. If you create things as a result of the hobby, do you know what you are going to do with those things? Trust me, if a hobby ends with something physical, you are going to wan a plan for what to do with everything you make. There are only so many drawers, shelves, and wall space for everything you are going to make if you like doing it.
    6. Do you have storage for anything that you need for it? Does your hobby have a lot of materials or items attached to it? Skiing, snowboarding, fishing, these hobbies can have a lot of materials. Jewelry has a lot of small items that you don’t necessarily want to lose track of. Make sure that you have a place to put everything when you aren’t enjoying yourself.

    If you’re good on all of these, go ahead and see how you like that new hobby! Give it a try, and I hope you have fun with the new skills you will learn or the time you’ll get to spend with others!

    Write Your Story: Unlock Your Creative Potential

    Are you ready to embark on a journey into the world of storytelling? Look no further! Introducing Write Your Story, a comprehensive resource designed to fuel your imagination, enhance your storytelling skills, and bring your characters to life. Whether you’re an aspiring writer, a seasoned author, or simply someone who loves crafting stories, this workbook is your ultimate companion.

    This Workbook Contains:

    • Story planning spreads
    • Setting and location spreads
    • Character spreads
    • Writing session tracker
  • Revising my life

    Revising my life

    1. Revising my life
    2. My life as a research project: Discovery
    3. My life as a research project: Hypothesis and metrics
    4. My life as a research project: The first project

    Well. All those self help books are getting to me.

    After all these years of reading and having a lot of trouble liking self help books, I have finally gotten to the point where some of the high level ideas are sinking in. I have issues with these books largely because they are very prescriptive and give you that one thing that will make your life amazing. It’s one central idea that you have to adapt and a bunch of tools that will make everything come together.

    But my life is larger than one or two areas. There’s a lot of different parts of it, and a lot of different things that I want to do. Different things I want to be eventually. One idea isn’t really enough to encapsulate all of that.

    So naturally, I’m starting to put together a system of my own to work out something that actually works for me.

    Given that this has been a rough year for me, I’ve been doing a lot of self reflection and I’m starting to put together what I actually want out of life. I’m doing a discovery phase with myself, trying to decide what I think a great life would be like and where I’m at now. It’s a lot of discovery for the moment, but I’ll be documenting some of my process as I go and see if I can find something that works. I’ve read enough of these self help books! I’m sure I’ve absorbed enough to make this work.

    So stay tuned and I’ll talk more about the process, what’s working and what isn’t. It should be fun!

  • Do you want downloadable writing worksheets?

    I created the Storyteller’s Workbook and the Worldbuilding Workbook because these are resources I’d made for myself and wanted to share them. They are structured in a way that makes sense for me, at least, to use them to keep track of notes as I’m writing.

    But that might not be how other people use them! I worry that there might be too many worksheets in one section and not enough in another and, well, that it’s just not flexible enough for individual writers and their projects.

    So I wanted pro propose a question to you. Would you want the worksheets in a downloadable PDF so that you could make as many as you needed for each of your projects? Printable in the standard letter and A5? Editable in something like GoodNotes?

    Do you want this? And what would work best for you?

    Write Your Story: Unlock Your Creative Potential

    Are you ready to embark on a journey into the world of storytelling? Look no further! Introducing Write Your Story, a comprehensive resource designed to fuel your imagination, enhance your storytelling skills, and bring your characters to life. Whether you’re an aspiring writer, a seasoned author, or simply someone who loves crafting stories, this workbook is your ultimate companion.

    This Workbook Contains:

    • Story planning spreads
    • Setting and location spreads
    • Character spreads
    • Writing session tracker

  • The Remy collection on Redbubble

    I’m sure you’re all familiar with my cat, Remy.

    Well, I’ve drawn her face and put it on a bunch of items on Redbubble!

    Go take a look!

  • I guess I’m on Redbubble now

    So. I started on another site.

    As some of you may already be aware, my life is very chaotic and I’ve been doing some hard thinking about whether or not I really intend on reopening the shop when I get back home and get access to my stock again. I think the answer is no. If I’m being honest, the shop was a lot more effort than the sales made it worth.

    So if you want any of the art things, I’m now on Redbubble! I am still very much planning on designing more things for the Writing Advice line, and I have a few more cat-related designs coming very shortly.

    I’m also still on Art of Where for those who are interested in the old designs, and I do fully intend on doing the more intentionally designed for the product types of things there, but Redbubble is a new fun thing where I can just put art that doesn’t necessarily have that very intentional purpose and I’m kind of excited for it.

  • Jewelry: My newest hobby

    I don’t know if this is unusual, but I seem to pick up hobbies pretty easily. Like, easier than it feels like most people I know. Many of my friends only seem to have one or two that they’ve stuck with for years and, well…

    To be fair, this one was an accident. It’s really an extension of the bottle charms if you think about it. After making a few of those (And I still make them, don’t get me wrong) I just had a lot of charms left over. As well as those really cute beads.

    I do find it very relaxing to create, and they are much quicker to finish than the bottles. But now I have all of the jewelry I’ve made and… well, I’m not going to wear all of this. I feel like this keeps happening.

    Please take all this jewelry from me. I am running out of space.

  • Making bottle charms

    The story behind me starting to make bottle charms was an accident. I got the bottles to put paper stars into. The problem was that they are too small for the stars to fit inside.

    I saw something online. Somewhere. I think it was an idea posted to a wedding group as something to put on tables for the guests to take at the end of the night. Some kind of decoration. Hopefully they weren’t making enough of these for everyone to take home, or that they had a very small wedding, because these are not as easy to make as I’d hope for a wedding.

    On the other hand, they’re very relaxing to make. And they’re pretty cute.

    Unfortunately for me, I have no idea what I’m going to do with them all. Please take them from me.