It’s been cold in Wisconsin. “Cursing fiendishly at my dogs because they can’t figure out how to use a toilet so I have to walk them” cold. Granted, I’ve lived through worse- both statistically and situationally, but I had hoped to use my refusal to leave the house as a powerful motivator to grab my NaNoWriMo project by the horns and edit, edit, and edit some more.

Instead I read a dozen books, watched at least as many movies, and lost track of the Netflix queue though that took a distant third to the other methods of cultural absorption.

So sure, my reading goals are sitting pretty, and my Oscar movie spreadsheet is filling out quite well*, but my writing? Especially my non-blog post writing? Woefully neglected. Lugubriously neglected.

February is a new month though, a perfect excuse for a a hard mash of the reset button.

I will write more. I will work on my novel more. Repeat that mantra fifty times, and then fifty more for good measure.

Chants and and affirmations can only get a person so far though, which is why I’ve attached two side projects to my February writing adventure- my Bullet Journal and Scrivener.

Bullet Journal (n.) – The notebook that I plan all of my garbage in. Monthly tasks, BujoWritingshopping lists, daily notes and to-dos – they are all in there scribbled with colored ink and accented with a pile of Korean stickers I found on Amazon.com. I’m not going to go in depth into the process, because there are several wonderful sites out there that do it far better and much prettier than I even could. Regardless, I am adding in a new spread this month to track the different writing projects that I have at present, the topics to cover, and word counts to aspire to.

It’s sad and empty little page at present, because February has existed for about 7 hours as I write this. However, I am a person oddly motivated to color in a tiny box, so being able to visualize my writing should go far towards a more satisfying month.

Scrivener (n.) – A program to keep my jumbled mess of forest creatures in one place. I am  going to get this figured out for my novel. I wrote the entire thing on a different platform that I’m just not feeling any longer, and I received a Scrivener discount for being a NaNoWriMo winner this past year. I’m working on importing and organizing so that I can do some far better work on editing and revising. At the same time though, I need to not get too organized, which seems a silly thought, but the sheer amount of folders, metadata options, tags, keywords, and summaries can get overwhelming. It would be just my curse to spend the entire month keyword linking everything at the expense of actually writing.

So that’s how I’m doing on writing. And look, I’ve already scrambled 500 words writing about writing, funny that.