If you live in North America, I’m sure you’ve heard of the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. Per one of the websites, “The challenge involves people getting doused with buckets of ice water on video, posting that video to social media, then nominating others to do the same, all in an effort to raise ALS awareness. People can either accept the challenge or make a donation to an ALS Charity of their choice, or do both.”

Of course The Daughter and all her friends think this is cool (pardon the pun) and are challenging each other. I’m pretty sure they’ve missed the point. And up until today, I’ve avoided it. Alas, as was inevitable, my name got called. But, to be honest, I don’t have a sense of humor. A sometimes sarcastic wit, perhaps…but my funnybone is very low in humor (perhaps there is a vitamin for that). Anyway, I have no desire to pour a bucket of ice water over my head, so I chose to donate.

So why is it I feel so guilty? The friend that nominated me is a little disappointed I didn’t opt for the ice, and The Daughter insists I still have to do the ice, but wasn’t it a choice? ALS as of today has raised something like $4.2M. That’s in cold hard cash, not cold hard ice (or would that be cold hard water?)

I made a donation to a good cause, but I feel guilty. (But no, I’m still not going to pour a bucket of water over my head.)

In most of my life, I’m a planner. I have lists for many of the things I do. I start packing lists weeks in advance. And I have 3 calendars…one on my phone for a quick look, a wall calendar so I can see it all at once, and a date book (that I can’t live without) so that I have room for those lists.

Recently I’ve noticed my writing is starting to move to the dark side; that the two are merging. I’ve started using timelines. I ripped out an entire month from an old calendar (a BIG calendar), and I blanked out the info in each of the squares. I get out my pack of post-its and I put my story points on each little yellow square and then I stick them to the blank squares of the calendar based on the relative day that event would occur. Does it make sense that A comes before B? Nope, move it to the next week.

I’m also a fan of colour coding my calendar. When the girls were young, pink versus blue made it easy to quickly look at the calendar and see if they were with us that weekend, or with “the others” (ie. Our respective exes.) With my writing calendar, I write my heroine POVs in red and my hero POVs in blue. Again, a visual slap-in-the-face that pretty much screams to me any imbalance.

I’m currently working a third story using this method. It shows me, literally, where more story is needed, and spots where I can spread the story out a little more. So far, I’m liking this method.

How do you stay organized in your writing or your life?