I sort of hate Jim Butcher right now. A lot. See, I read his livejournal, which is a blog about writing. He details there what he did to write Dresden. For those of you who don’t know, Jim was a student at the University of Oklahoma and enrolled in a creative writing class. He got into a pissing contest, so to speak, with his creative writing teacher and in an “I’ll show you this doesn’t work!” kind of moment, he did exactly what she said to do. His point was that it would make his work less creative.

That’s when he outlined the (originally, 13 book) Dresden files series.

So his teacher kinda had the last laugh.

Then Jim went and wrote out the process he used and was taught in class in his LiveJournal. Which I read.

Disclaimer: I’ve been in a similar situation with my LSE® for a long time. I am an avowed pantser and I don’t know what’s going to happen in my story till I write it. The problem is? When you’re trying to write a series, a complicated series, it’s kind of hard to be a pantser. She’s been trying to get me to outline in order to spare me the misery of rewriting.

So after reading Jim Butcher’s livejournal, I am TRYING to outline my series. More than the poem, which serves as my current outline. More than the spreadsheet that I looked at and tried to fill out and….did fill out for book 2. But then I got to book 3 and I only filled in the ending.

Anyway I sort of hate Jim Butcher.

I’m trying his method in a short story first. I started with the series before and it made me stop writing. So now I am trying it with this short story. Hopefully it will go better. Baby steps. I’ll let you know how it goes.