Edison and Me: How NOT to Do Something Difficult

I have the information for the first module of How To Write A Series more or less finished.  The story is done and beautifully edited. NOT by me. I’m fighting myself over the damn cover art.

So far so good.

And today I spent six hours trying to figure out how to bring all of this information—and there is a lot of it, including some new techniques I came up with to make this whole Writing A Series Without Having It Fall Apart On You Three Books Down The Line process simpler… When I hit the weird and wacky wall of SOFTWARE. Of All things.

Started with Inspiration. Nope, that’s not gonna work. It’s missing presentation options I need.

Moved to ConceptDraw Mindmap. SO not going to work. It’s missing MOST of the options I need to get this done.

I spent that six hours learning two detailed course creation processes that won’t work for this course.

Edison spent a lot longer than that on the lightbulb, and a lot more tries, but unlike Edison, I’ve built courses before, and I thought going in that I knew exactly how to present this.

Now I’m looking at Keynote, and considering slides and downloads.

Or going my Ugly Workshop route with hand-drawn diagrams on quad paper.

Or… something else.

My objectives are to be concise and fast, to make sure I cover the material thoroughly but that I don’t overwhelm anyone with details, to make sure I make this as easy as possible for the writer to use, and to create a fun, entertaining, interesting course that allows writers to achieve success on their first use of the course, as well as with subsequent uses.

So. I’m struggling. I’m going spend a few hours this evening getting the rest of my background material and notes together.

And I’m promising myself one more time that this will NOT end up being as big a course as How To Think Sideways. Or even How To Revise Your Novel.

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