Hey hey!
Several months ago I listened to a Hello Internet podcast where one of the hosts, Grey, spoke of something called "brain crack", a phenomenon where you imagine how you would handle a personal/public/national/world problem with such competence and imagination that you get addicted to the daydream, rather than taking action toward solving the actual problems, or anything else in your life that needs doing.
This trait is not always useful for dealing with day-to-day life, but it is absolutely critical when I'm outlining out a novel. That brain-crack journey is how I feel out a story before I write it. How I figure out the plot beats and character interactions.
I used to write it down in a spiral note book, but I've since started using a free program called yWriter that has a fantastic chapter-by-chapter outlining function. It also allows for writing the actual novel using its application, but I can't break away from Word, nor do I really want to. More than that, yWriter is the place where I feel more comfortable letting the daydreams of the plot flow through my mind. Sometimes, I'll go minutes on end with out typing anything, yet feeling very productive with the mental exercise.
And that productivity is bearing out an outline of Players of the Game Book 5. Right now, I think it's going to be called The Game War, though that may change. The story will likely change substantially from the outline, and that's totally fine. Having a map makes for a better journey, especially if you try out a few detours.
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