Wow, a new year, a new planning method, and a new planner. We're all set, or are we? As you recall from the introductory article, I created the Middle Way Method to help take advantage of the best aspects of top down, and bottom up planning. Soon after creating the methodology, I realized that in order to put this practice to work, I'd need to hack together a new planner, which I've called the Middle Way notebook. I showed you how to create one of your own last month.

Now I'd like to take some time and look at how the method, system, and journal all work together to create planning nirvana. In this article, I'll guide you through the process of working with the Middle Way Method System and corresponding planner. We'll use the methodology's step by step planning process to guide you through real-life examples (from my life) of how I use the forms and method. The whole weekly planning process usually takes me 15 to 30 minutes, unless I choose to journal for a longer amount of time. To help you understand this process, I'll be using examples from my personal life.

Hand getting cramped when you write more than a few paragraphs? Loosen up! Many people middle-age or younger are used to having to grasp pens and pencils very tightly to make lines. After a page or two of writing like this, the hand and wrist may begin to hurt. However, with gel and fountain pens such a tight grasp is rarely necessary. Train yourself to write looser by consciously slackening your grip, especially when you notice pain or cramps starting. It's not an easy habit to break, but it can be done. Soon writing can be a pleasure.

In these days of Twitter, texting and five-second Facebook comments, it seems as though there's also a bit of a backlash against "quick and dirty" digital correspondence. Many find that the humanity seems to be missing, and so on the bookstore shelves can now be found scores of books on hand-written notes, love letters, travelogues, greeting cards, and --above all-- honest-to-goodness pen-and-ink letter writing. There's a renaissance afoot.

So for this week's pick (actually our very first weekly pick) we'd like to highlight a thought-provoking article from The Art of Manliless by Brett and Kate McKay entitled The Art of Letter Writing, an overview of tools, expression, style and etiquette:

[...] But when it comes to sharing one’s true thoughts, sincere sympathies, ardent love, and deepest gratitude, words traveling along an invisible superhighway will never suffice. Why?

Because sending a letter is the next best thing to showing up personally at someone’s door. Ink from your pen touches the stationary, your fingers touch the paper, your saliva seals the envelope. Something tangible from your world travels through machines and hands, and deposits itself in another’s mailbox. Your letter is then carried inside as an invited guest. The paper that was sitting on your desk, now sits on another’s. The recipient handles the paper that you handled. Letters create a connection that modern, impersonal forms of communication will never approach.

Read more: The Art of Letter Writing

There's plenty of little things we think of here that aren't meaty enough for a full article, but that might help the odd reader and perhaps instigate a little discussion. To that end, we'd like to introduce a new feature here on DIYPlanner: Quick Tips. These will be posted several times a week, and will run the gamut from pens and notebooks to creative techniques to digital productivity. (Hey, we analog luddites do occasionally use computers, too, or else you wouldn't be reading these words.) So, our first official Quick Tip:

Like the freedom of writing on an unlined page, but your words start tipping to an angle the further down the page you write? Take a tip from old-style blank writing pads. These generally come with a lined page you could slip under your current page, and there would be just enough hint of lines to keep your writing even and on track. If you don’t have such a lined page for your paper or journal, use Ygor’s dynamic templates to generate lined note pages with the line spacing and thickness that works best for you.

Do you have a quick tip? Email it to diyplanner -@AT@- gmail dot com!

Well, it's the end of November and I achieved what I set out to do. This year, I gone and done crazy (and it was crazy, believe me!). I wrote 50,768 words by hand. It took me 17 days; with an average of 3,000 words a day. If you go to my domain, you can check out the daily log that I kept through it all. It details my progress through the month: the good, the bad, and the whining.

TGIO, or Thank God It's Over, happened twice for me this year. The short and sweet point of it happened when I turned in the novel and got official approval of being a winner. However, the earlier and more bittersweet moment happened when I penned the words "The End" onto the last signature of my writing journal. That moment is the hardest, because I I had to say goodbye to the world I've created. Seventeen days is quite a long time to live in the world of my protagonist. A world where magic lives and good triumphs over evil--with nothing more than the power of intellect. I loved writing about the lives of my characters, their journey of uncovering information, and exposing the darker side of what could exist in our world. After spending all that time in this world, it's hard to let it go. This year, when I closed the leather cover, it made the transition from that world back to my world seem very real. I went to bed that night and cried. I wasn't ready to let go. Is any writer really ready for that moment?

But it's all over for me now. Seeing that I've had a week or so to think it all over, I wanted to share some final thoughts on what I learned from the experience of writing longhand.

Here's a pair of quick-and-dirty "I Did" list templates for Shris based on the discussion over here: http://www.diyplanner.com/node/6151

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Owning a home is fun. I get to hang curtains up (in a color of my choosing), I get to modify the house in any way that benefits my lifestyle, and most importantly, I get to paint the walls with color and patterns.

One of the things I plan on doing to my home, when I get my library, is to stencil and paint some of my favorite quotes on the wall as a top border. This has been one of my dreams for almost 10 years now. I thought that was a good idea and then I read about Charlie Kratzer and how he took a Sharpie (or 10) to his basement walls and hand-sketched murals all over every available wall.

I'm amazed at how wonderful it all looks! Maybe one day I'll draw in some effects for some of my walls. Once I overcome the fear of being a "bad" sketch artist.

I was reading Neil Gaiman's blog today and came across this interesting link. Someone had taken some of his prose (the infamous "I Believe" passage from American Gods) and rendered it in Wordle.

It's a word-art site where you feed it passages of text and it spits it out in a mind map sort of visual-word poetry/art. You can create your own account, upload all sorts of interesting passages, see how the site creates renders of what you add and share it with others.

I'm making all sorts of word art with it to use as covers for my journals, greeting card covers and just fun background image art.

Natalie Goldberg, author of Writing Down the Bones, used to write and rewrite poems in college so she could memorize them. She writes,

In college I was in love with literature. I mean wild about it. I typed poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins over and over again so I could memorize them. I read John Milton, Shelley, Keats aloud and swooned on my narrow bed in the dormitory.

I copy bits and pieces of my favorite writers prose down in my journals, tucked between entries of daily life and my own imagination. I keep various quotes and story snippets from writers I admire among my index cards. While I write them down, as the pen makes scratching marks across my pages, I look at the language: how it runs off my pen (or mind's tongue), how long the sentences are, and what words were used. I like to think that it helps me dissect language down into uncovering what makes them work and "so great."

Have you ever attempted to imitate your favorite writer's prose? How well did that go? Feel free to share your experiences in the comments below.