Back in March, I wrote a blog post titled “It’s That Organizing my Writing Project” in which I wrote about going through my writing in the effort to see just what I have and what I should do with it. This project came out of a meeting with my writing coach, Kate Hopper, that we had well over a year ago back in 2019 when people could meet at cafes and talk over breakfast (oh how I miss those days). At that meeting I talked with Kate about my writing goals. “Should I write a book?” “Do I have anything to say?” and “What would I write about?” These are the types of questions I asked Kate. And Kate told me, basically, “Yes!” and “Yes!” And (I am paraphrasing) “Print up all the stuff you’ve written and mark it up as to what themes you’ve written about and then we’ll look at what you’ve got and go from there.”

So I decided to organize my writing using Scrivener software and didn’t get very far. Then I decided just to print everything (like Kate said in the first place) but got stalled again in trying to organize my computer files so I could figure out what to print. So I gave up on all that and simply opened my computer and started printing things I’ve written in a haphazardly organized fashion. I creating a list of themes that often show up in my writing and a color coding system so I could flag each piece as to what theme or themes are in the piece. When I finished printing everything  that was easily accessible and printable (I know there’s loads more material handwritten in journals but I’m not going to deal with that for now) my stack of writing was  2 1/2″ thick and weighed 7 pounds!