Preptober Bullet Journal

Its October, Which means it is also Preptober, the month where those around the writing world are preparing their ideas, outlining and plotting for Nanowrimo next month. I have been working on an idea for the past few months and I am pushing myself to have a complete outline of it by the end of this month so I can go one to sculpt a zero-draft of it in November.
I am hoping to reach my 50k words in November by fleshing out my initial bullet draft which I will write this month. This will hopefully give me a solid foundation with snippets of dialogue and all the twists and turns in place to take my time writing a full first draft over Christmas and into 2022.
I have a number of tools to help me get working on this including my Writer’s journal which you can find here, a TBR of craft books which I am discussing later and my everyday bullet journal, which is the subject of todays post.

October/Preptober Bullet Journal

Supplies

I always use a Nuuna dotted note book as my bullet journal . I like that it is slightly larger than A5 with 0.5 dot spacing. for the layouts this month I have chosen a brown and gold colour scheme so I have used:
Uniball Signo Noble Metal – Bronze
Uniball Signo Noble Metal – Gold
Staedtler Triplus Pastel and Vintage highlighter – Brown

For day to day handwriting I have chosen my Turquoise Lami Safari fountain pen with fine nib, it is filled with Diamine ink in sepia.

October Monthly Spread

Title page

Like I have said previously I like keeping my title pages simple and elegant. This is because they take little to know effort and time to draw but still look pretty. I have kept the 1920’s Art Deco style which I have really been loving. I think it looks really stunning in the bronze and gold. It really shines of the page.

Calendar, Blog posts and Reading Record

A bullet journal is a useful tool for organising day to day life and for me that also means keeping track of my reading and my blog posts too.
In this spread I have four sections. The calendar is used just to mark down quick appointments, birthdays etc. and the Important section is where I can make longer notes and future planning. Here I will usually just mark the day and then the associated information. When filling in next months calendar I can glance back and mark in any important dates I have made note of.
The left hand page contains my Books Read section. I don’t keep my TBR in my Journal instead I mark off the books I have read. I print little stickers of each book cover that I read in the month and paste them in this section along with the star rating and page count. At the end of the month I can easily see what books I have read and what I thought of them. Through out the month I have a page for each book I read that I make when I start each book this will have my notes and ESCAPE Score for each read.
Finally I have my Blog post tracker. I like to try and plan and write my posts in advance so this section is usually split by date and the post/ review I want to write for that date. Then I can mark when I have written and scheduled each post.

Daily spread

Again this is a very very simple spread. Its just a box for each day. I can fill in any appointments I have that day. any notes that are needed and I also will record daily reading there. Again I print mini stickers of the books I am reading and the pages read that day.

Preptober Spread

Title page

Yes another simple title page in the same style as my monthly page. I decided to keep the same colour scheme too. I feel it is appropriate as I am writing a space based mystery inspired by the Queen of Crime herself Agatha Christie and the stylings of the space station in the videogame Pray which has a very 1920s/30 feel it it with the mahogany and the brass so I feel keeping the bronze and gold will really inspire my worldbuilding. Also pictured is my writers notebook. I carry this with me all the time and it is filled with scribbles and ideas that I am going to be parsing out this month hopefully into an outline for a story!

Goals and outlines

I Then have a spread for my goals for this month which again is to continue brainstorming and then outlining my idea. As well as a section for my outline. I have tried other outlines in the past but really liked Katytastic’s 3 Acts, 9 Blocks, 27 chapters method. While I never stick to the 27 chapters it helps me think of the story arc overall in a really broken down manor which just makes it easier for me to make sure I have a complete story and not one that gets lost in the middle (which I have done before).

I set up the Writing Sessions tracker a couple of years ago for a Nanowrimo and it worked really well for me. It gave me space to track how much time I am spending on writing, What type of writing I am doing, What I was working on and any notes I want to leave for myself for the next session. This allows me to glance back to find out where I left off and what still needs done but also how i was feeling etc.

Lastly I have my Zero Draft Check list. My zero draft checklist is something I will be creating as the month goes on. This is essentially all the elements I want to hit when writing my zero draft in November. So it will be a combination of all the elements I need to pull together this month such as character profiles, worldbuilding and setting descriptions as well as a general bullet draft as a check list that I can tick off as I write each section in November.
In fact I can add and check off the first task on that list and that is to announce my project on The Nanowrimo website. It just has a working title at the moment, i will need to brainstorm a title, but it’s a fun step to getting this project off the ground.

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So that Is my Preptober Bullet Journal set up.
If you are interested in me talking about my writing more let me know.

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Happy Reading!