That Time Jen Made All New Project Boards

The cave paintings in the Writing Cave are mostly project boards. One entire wall is devoted to them.

These are things Jen sets up, large sheets of card stock to hold sticky notes that get pulled down as their tasks are completed. Each board has its novel’s title inked across the top in three-inch letters, and any cover concept or mock-up that we have gets clipped to the edge. We work in trilogies, and the metal strip for our nifty neodymium magnets is just long enough for us to hang three boards.

Well. A couple of weeks ago, Kent came home and his little mind was blown! The project wall had been completely redone. There were still three boards, but instead of being book-oriented they were now trilogy-oriented. Suddenly nine novels’ worth of project tracking occupied a space where heretofore had only ever been three. Kent boggled, a flatlander perceiving the Z-axis for the first time.

Jen excels at this type of organizational wizardry, and thrives on having such artifacts in the environment. Her desk and Kent’s are pretty much equally cluttered, which disguises her greater affinity for order. There is of course a system in the clutter, but we both admit that it’s inefficient. (Our annual workspace archeological expeditions tend to turn up many un/pleasant surprises.) The key to the project boards is that they’re placed on a vertical surface, which makes it much harder to pile crap up on them.

What else adorns the walls of the cave? There is a signed, framed XKCD print, framed copies of the covers from the Divided Man series, and lots of bookshelves. Atop a bookcase live a globe and a set of matryoshka dolls (one of which seems to be haunted).

A writing partner is someone who wants to spend a lot of time in the cave with you.