Talk About My Favorite Authors: WIP Notebook

I found the WIP Notebook when I was reading a new entry in Charlotte Dillion's blog, Life as a Writer, Or Something Close to It. I thank the heavens for that because I will be using it to organize and keep track of my first manuscript. Charlotte Dillion wrote that it's a good notebook to use to keep track of your manuscript and here is a direct quote from her blog entry on how the notebook could be useful:

When starting a new novel, or even after digging up one of your old ones that needs a little love and care, you need a way to keep up with lots of info. The believability of your story depends on it. Even after you finish the story and send it out, there's tons of stuff to keep track of, like when you mailed that manuscript, who you mailed it to, when it was rejected and by who, and when you sent it back out and to who, ect...

She said that she found this notebook so helpful that she wanted to share it and I'm glad that she did. She even wrote a quote, which she says she doesn't give good quotes unless she means them, about the WIP Notebook that Jeannie Ruesch has on her website. Jeannie is a fiction writer herself, she thought of everything a writer woul

d need to keep up with, and placed a section for each in the WIP notebook. There's places to list everything from your working title and date started to the date you completed it and even who you submitted the manuscript to and when. You'll also find plenty of space to fill in things like characters profiles, family trees, info on each chapter, sub plots, conflict, setting descriptions, a timeline chart, and more. Like I said, everything a working writer needs to keep up with about her newest manuscript or as some would say "newest baby", all in one place.

The e-doc version is in Microsoft Word, so it's simple to make a boxed section bigger when you want to add extra info, or to delete and retype things when you make changes in your story. It's also easy to print up, save to a CD or a flash drive, or even send it to yourself as an attachment that you can save in an e-mail account that's not on your computer, so you won't lose all of that needed information. I have the spiral WIP Notebook, which has a nice story on how I got it in the first place. Well I went to Jeannie Ruesch's website and I found out that she was having a contest where you could win either the e-doc version or the spiral W.I.P Notebook. I tried to enter by signing up for her newsletter but I kept getting an error message. I sent her a complaint e-mail and she e-mailed me back to say that she fixed the problem and that for my trouble she would send me a free W.I.P Notebook. I chose to get the spiral notebook and she sent it to me with an inscription that I will always remember.

Here are some quotes that Jeannie Ruesch has on the page where you can find out more about the WIP Notebook that I thought everyone would like to read before they decided on what they think about the notebook:

"Jeannie Ruesch has created the perfect tool for writers. This workbook has everything you'll need to stay organized--all in one place!"

--National Bestselling Author Brenda Novak

I have the e-doc version of Jeannie Ruesch's Novel Notebook. I'm not the kind of person who gives good quotes unless I mean them, so this is my honest opinion. I love the Novel Notebook because it's a complete keep-everything-in-one-place solution for your novel in progress, and even your completed and submitted novel.

-- Writer Charlotte Dillon

There is also a couple of sample pages from the book that she has on the website that you can easily access for free. Like I mentioned above that Jeannie Ruesch is a writer and she will be having her first novel published by Wild Rose Press. Her novel is a Regency-set historical romance called Something About Her. It's also the first book in her Willoughby Family Series. Here is the description of the book from her website and picture:

Something About Her by Jeannie Ruesch

Michael Ashton, the Duke of Ravensdale, is caught in two scandals, neither of which is his own doing. The first involves a woman (don’t they always), and the second…well, it also involves a woman and a large sum of stolen money. In order to save the reputation Michael has spent his life rebuilding, he must track down the widow of his presumed-dead cousin in order to charm...or seduce her missing husband's whereabouts from her.

After being abandoned a mere hour after her wedding, Blythe Merewood Ashton wonders how she could have been fooled by such a cad and still feels humiliated and betrayed a year later. Her husband wooed her, married her, took her money and left. When she learns of his death, she decides unceremoniously to go on with her life—without a man. So when Thomas’s cousin—a Duke, no less—shows up uninvited on her doorstep, looking more handsome and irresistible than any man should, Blythe instinctively doesn’t trust him nor does she want to like him. But her traitorous heart doesn’t seem to care. At the same time, Michael’s clear agenda gets quite blurry when the woman he believes an accomplice to his cousin's schemes turns out to be the woman he can give his heart to…and the only one he can’t have.