I’ve been feeling pretty crappy the past few days, and apprently it’s that time of year, because my bud Fal has felt the same way, and she’s way up there in Illinois. I’m on the upswing, though, and I hope she is, too.

I love September. The word is nice, the birthstone is sapphire, the weather is cooler, the kids are firmly in school, football starts…There’s nothing to dislike about September. Well, we do have FOUR family birthdays in September–mine, my husband’s, my son’s, and my step-son’s–on top of the back-to-school expense, auto insurance is due and Christmas is just around the corner…So yeah, financially it’s usually pretty stressful in September. I haven’t had a birthday present in years. If I had the money I’d probably have to buy my present myself, anyway.

But still…September is nice. Energizing. Full of possibility.

I think I’m going to try a technique with my novel that I used for the long synopsis. For the synopsis, I wrote and typed everything out, then I cut apart the scenes and rearranged them into the best order. It’s one of those things I’ve tried before according to someone else’s instructions with no success, but once I threw out my internal rule book and played it by ear, it worked out well. With the novel I’ve tried notecards, but writing a hundred notecards and deciding which information is important enough to go on each notecard was just too unwieldy, so I decided I wasn’t an organizer after all. But again, I had fallen into the trap lots of writers fall into–the “should” trap, the “rules” trap, the “everybody knows better than I do” trap.

So I’m going to make up this technique as I go along. I’ll print out the whole book–backstory, current scenes, deleted scenes–and staple together the pages of each scene, cutting the page with scissors if necessary to separate them. After that…I don’t know. We’ll see. I hesitate to tell you exactly what I do, because I don’t want to perpetuate that “rules” mentality. Art doesn’t follow rules.