Here Today, Blog Tomorrow #12

Rather than bore you with the mundane tasks I've been writing about for the past two weeks, I figured I'd try something different. Fresh reading My Boring-Ass life by Kevin Smith, I was under the impression that everyone wants to read what people do in their daily lives. The only problem is, all the tasks I do, the movies I rent and the things I eat are all meaningless without something very important: Theme.

So, because there should by something you can take away from this, I've decided to focus each day on one central thought that I have. We don't have to take a trip through my day, you can just sit back and relax.

To start, I'd like to say that I think every author should have a Jumble Box.

Let me explain.

Today, while writing, I found two things I could put in my jumble box. The two things were an ending for a future novel and a code put in my third novel. The jumble box is a document I use to catalogue all the ideas that pop into my head. In the past, whenever something would strike me, say, a line of dialogue, an ending scene, a beginning scene; I would hurriedly write it on a scrap of paper. I'd collected the scraps of paper and shove them in a file and put them in my writing desk. The only problem is I get so many ideas that now I have fifteen folders instead of one. I've written on the backs of receipts, napkins, posters, flyers, my hand, my arms, pretty much anywhere. But those things are frail and sometimes unreadable.

Now I just created a document on my flash drive called The Jumble Box. Nothing's numbered or anything. It all just follows a very basic organization table, something like this:

Name of Book ( Novel, Collection or Novella) - A paragraph of description, dialogue or plot points and character names.

That's pretty much it.

And it has served me well.

So far, I've entered 12 ideas into it and hope to one day enter in all the data from all fifteen folders. I won't through them out but at least, with this, I can comb over the ideas with a more selective eye rather than picking, digging into piles of crumpled papers which are barley legible.

What's in your Jumble Box? Do you have one? If not, why not?