When I wrote Commodork (my first self-published book), I had no idea what I was doing. And although I hadn’t had a lick of training, I did have a pretty good sense of story. Before I started writing I made a list of all the stories I wanted to tell in the book. Then I wrote the titles of all those stories out on index cards, sorted them into piles, and put the piles in an order that made sense to me. The piles ultimately became my chapters. Of course, my cards didn’t contain every single detail — in fact,… (read more)