Writing Tip (6): Checklists (Plus Facebook Revisited)

Writing fantasy or science fiction means that you get to make stuff up -- yay! The trouble is, my memory is never as fantastic as I think it is, and so I'll make something up, put it in the story, and then a few weeks later when I want to use it again somewhere else, I can't remember it! So then I have to scroll through pages and pages trying to remember where exactly I mentioned it (and I can't use the "Find" tool because I can't remember how to spell the word I made up, or I can't remember what the word is at all!)

Eventually I compiled a document that I labelled Fact File. I arranged everything into categories (Creatures, Humans, Places, Different Names for the Same Things That Exist in Our World, etc.) and now every time I make up something new I immediately add it to my Fact File :-)

Here's another way of being organised...

Science fiction and fantasy novelist Steven Harper, author of WRITING THE PARANORMAL NOVEL, has created checklist worksheets to help you write your own story of the supernatural.
(Click on the image to be taken to a .pdf of each checklist)

Facebook Revisited

After reading all the comments on my Things I Never Knew About Facebook post (and doing some thinking), I came to the conclusion that it is best to have both an ACCOUNT and a PAGE.

You see, the page is cool and everything (especially if you've made it big and you have lots of fans!), but it's sort of a little bit selfish, because the page can't go and "Like" and "Friend" other people. So if you're wanting to also "give back" then you need an actual account that you can use to interact with other Facebookers.

Which is why you'll now see both of these on my sidebar :-)







If it so happens that you become awesomely famous and people are searching for you all the time on Facebook and sending friend requests to your ACCOUNT, when actually you want them to be "Liking" your PAGE because you don't have a potting clue who they all are and you don't really want to be "Friends" with all of them, then you can go to the Privacy Settings on your account and adjust them so that only people who are already your friends will be able to search and find you.

Things I Never Knew About Facebook

Right. So. For a number of years I've had a personal Facebook account.

Recently I created a separate Facebook account that I could use to interact with my students at school (this started during the teacher strikes last year and the easiest way for me to contact/educate them was through Facebook - go figure).

Today I decided to create a Rachel Morgan Facebook account (if you're counting, this is now number three!). So then I was going through the blogs that I follow to see who had links to Facebook, and I was clicking through to add those people as friends. I noticed then that some people had PAGES rather than actual accounts. So I looked up some info about pages, and that's when I discovered this:

Please be aware that maintaining multiple accounts is a serious violation of Facebook's Terms of Use. If we determine that an individual has more than one account, we reserve the right to terminate all of their accounts.

Eish. Ok. So I then decided to DELETE my new Rachel Morgan account and my school account and make pages instead :-) Which is far easier actually, now that I don't have to keep logging into three separate accounts. And the great thing is -- for those of you worried about protecting your real name -- even though you (the real you) are the administrator of the page, no one ever sees this administrator name (unless you write it somewhere on the page, of course). Whenever you post anything on the page, the page's name is used.

Anyway, so now I have a cute little Facebook button on the sidebar of my blog where you can "Like" me :-)
(Um... please like me... please??)

(And for those of you that I sent a friend request to from my in-the-process-of-being-deleted account, I'm sorry!)

And here's the website that taught me all about using Facebook Pages.