The Journal Newsletter
- Introduction
- Tips & Tricks
- Article: How I Used The Journal to Write The Girl Who Ran With Horses
- Submission Information
Introduction
Happy Holidays, everyone!
I’m working on a minor (free) update of The Journal 5.1. So if you have any bugs you haven’t reported because you were waiting for Christmas, now is a good time to let me know. 🙂 I had hoped to have this update done before Christmas, but it might not be available until after the New Year. If I get it done before then, I’ll announce it on the email discussion list.
This month’s tips show you how to copy and paste entries from the entry tree, and how to select more than one entry to create a batch for copying, pasting, etc. Finally, I describe how I used The Journal to write my newly released young adult novel, The Girl Who Ran With Horses.
Thank you for using The Journal!
Tips & Tricks
TIP: Copying & Pasting Entries
As of The Journal 5, you can copy and paste entire entries (with all sub-entries) to and from the Windows clipboard. This provides a quick and easy way to create a copy of an entry or to copy an entry to another category.
To copy an entry and all of its sub-entries to the clipboard, all you have to do is right-click the entry in the entry tree and choose “Copy Entry to Clipboard”. Sub-entries are copied automatically. You don’t need to select them explicitly.
To paste the entry, with all of its sub-entries, you have 2 choices:
- “Paste Entry from Clipboard” – pastes the copied entry into the entry tree at the root level.
- “Paste Entry as Sub-Entry” – pastes the copied entry as a sub-entry of the currently active entry.
Both “Paste Entry…” commands are available when you right-click on the entry tree, or on the “Entry” menu.
You can also “cut” an entry and all its sub-entries to the clipboard, and paste it the same way. NOTE: There is no “undo” for cutting an entry from the tree. You would need to paste the entry to get it back.
TIP: Selecting Multiple Entries in the Entry Tree
You can select multiple entries if you press the Ctrl key and hold it down while you click on entries in the entry tree. You can do this to select as many entries as you want.
You can then copy, cut, or delete the selected entries as a batch.
If you copy the selected entries to the clipboard (see the tip above), you can then paste the content of those entries into a word processor like MS Word or even Notepad. The content of the selected entries will be pasted in the same order in which they are in the entry tree (not the order you selected them). That can be an easy way to “export” a couple-three entries without having to use the “Export Entries…” command.
Article
How I Used The Journal to Write The Girl Who Ran With Horses
by David Michael
In late 2005, as I was finishing up a novel, my 13-year-old niece, Heather, told me that my next book should be “about a grl and she is a brl rcr and she iz jus like ME” (translation: “about a girl who is a barrel racer just like me”).
Heather actually told me a lot more than that. I recorded our IM conversation in The Journal as the first my many notes for the project:
I started with that chat log, and used it as the root entry for a collection of notes about the story: a summary, a rough outline, research, and even some correspondence with Heather (where I asked her to review the rough outline and had her come up with names for most of the horses).
When I (finally) started to work on this book in January 2007, I created a new set of entries for it in what I call my “Development” category (which is also a loose-leaf category):
I linked to my original notes, then copied over the rough line into a new entry and began fleshing it out:
Most of the sub-entries under “Notes” for the Horse Girl project were from my research into horses and horse ranching. I’ll admit it: I’m a city boy. I’ve ridden horses only a few times in my life, and never as an adult. I had a lot of research to do, even just for the outline. I kept track of most of it here, in the “Development” category. I would copy the link to the articles I found–and usually I would copy the entire text of the article (and most of the images) into an entry. Because you never know if Web articles are going to stay where you found them.
Once I was happy with my outline, I created a separate loose-leaf category for this project where I would do the real work of writing a book: the actual writing.
I called the new category “Horse Girl” (because that’s much less effort to type and takes up a lot less tab space). I created a some root-level entries to help keep things organized. You can see those here:
For those of you keeping count, what I have called “Outline – Draft 1” in the above screen shot is about draft, oh, 4 by this time. But it’s the first draft I created in this category. 🙂 And, yes, the outline evolved over the course of writing the book. For some reason, though, I didn’t keep draft copies.
I used a series of entries to manage the actual manuscript: A top-level “Manuscript” entry, a sub-entry for each separate draft, and then separate sub-sub-entries for each chapter. Like this:
+–Draft 1
+–Chapter 1
+–Chapter 2
+–…
I also created a “Thoughts” entry where I could leave date-stamped notes to myself as I went along. And I created the “Notes” entry where I added further research links and images. I do a lot of what you might call “just-in-time research”, usually via Google, that happens in the middle of a day’s writing.
I’m sure you’ve noticed (if you’ve looked at the accompanying images) the “Publisher Hunt” entry, which has sub-entries as well. Under there I put drafts of my query letter (there were several) and compiled the list of publishers I wanted to submit to. For each publisher, I collected their mailing address, Web page, and submission requirements in separate entries (one per publisher). I also tracked my submission history, including what kind of response I received (most of them were form rejections; c’est la vie).
Yes, I’m a bit of a text-oriented packrat. If I wrote it, I like to keep it handy. Fortunately, The Journal makes it easy (if I do say so myself) to hang onto all of those notes and scraps of information I accumulate–and organize them so they don’t clutter up my workspace.
And that’s about it. I made heavy use of loose-leaf categories and entries to formulate, plan and write The Girl Who Ran With Horses.
In November 2010, I released The Girl Who Ran With Horses as an independently published novel, available in both trade paperback and ebook formats. You can check it out on Amazon:
The Girl Who Ran With Horses
Submission Information
If you would like to contribute to the “How I Use The Journal”, “Writing Exercises”, or “Tips & Tricks” sections, or would like to submit an article about journaling, writing, or another The Journal-related topic, we would love to hear from you.
Submissions for the newsletter should be sent to: support@davidrm.com
If you are submitting for a particular section, please indicate which one. Try to limit your submissions to 500-1000 words. Submissions may be edited for length and content.
If you prefer to remain anonymous, please state this in the email. Otherwise your name (but not your email) will be used in the article heading.
As always, if you have any suggestions for, or bug reports about, The Journal, please feel free to email them. Both are always welcome.