On Wed, 14 May 1997, Ryan Mathews wrote:

[snip]

I am having a great deal of trouble finding time to write while 
working full-time.  Work takes the best hours of the day from me.  
I'd love to write after coming home, but I just don't know how.  I'm 
too drained.  In a sense, the problem is that my job is too 
interesting.  As a software engineer, I write code and hunt down bugs 
all day long.  By the end of the day, I'm all thunk out.  When I sold 
shoes, I had problems with being tired, but I still managed to push 
out a chapter of something every month.  The job was maddeningly 
boring, so I had plenty of time to work through story ideas in my 
head.

Curiously enough, I have almost the exact same job description, although
I don't doubt you're doing a higher caliber of work than I am.  I'm a
lowly DOS programmer.  :P  ;)

I'd be curious to know how other people manage to work full-time and 
still remain an active fanfic writer.  Or perhaps fanfic writing is 
better left to the college kids.  :-(

It's simple.  I keep a writer's notebook with me all the time.  Whenever
an idea hits me, I jot it down.  During my lunch break, I flesh it out a
little.  I keep my ideas for one story together in the notebook, which
is a ring binder with pages I can take out, or add.  In the evenings, I
go over my ideas and brainstorm.
There are about four different story ideas in my notebook right now, but
the only one getting any development is my BGC/Doctor Who crossover.  I
don't exactly have a neat and tidy outline all fleshed out, but I've
written down enough (odd quotes I want my characters to say during the
course of the story, story flow ideas, what if's, etc.) that I know
where my story is going, how it will end, and what will happen in the
meantime.
I know I can't keep track of the ideas I have for the stories I want to
write eventually, or am working on but am doing something else when the
idea occurs to me.  That's what the notebook is for.  If nothing else, I
can re-use old ideas that never made it to print.  ;)

Damon Casale, damoo@carmelnet.com
Spam, spam!  WONDERFUL spam!  ^_^