Creative projects are exciting. And, scary. For more than fifteen years, I’ve been developing a structured process to make my creative projects more fun and less frightening.

I call this structured process The Guidebook because it leads me from a whisper of an idea through all of the twists and turns that take me to a completed project.

Creative projects are both beautiful and disorienting. The Guidebook provides a map.

The Guidebook leads me around all kinds of obstacles that accompany creative projects. I never face a blank page. Chicken-and-egg problems disappear while I’m working my way through the stages of The Guidebook. I have multiple tools to help me handle the times when ideas come at me with the force of a fire hose and when they barely dribble.

The Guidebook, in its current form, is a series of illustrations with questions and tasks that help me plot my path to completion. That works well for me, but it needs some context to be useful to other people.

My vision for The Guidebook is to provide the text that will transform it to a full-fledged book. But, first, I want to see how other people interact with The Guidebook, so that I have more than my own experience to draw from when I write the encouraging words that help more people complete more creative projects.

This is where you come in. What creative project could you complete this fall? I’m going to do NaNoWriMo — a challenge to write a 50,000 word novel during the month of November.

Creative projects, like flowers, go through several distinct stages.

Join me and a cohort of others working through The Guidebook to complete a creative project. We’ll plan and prepare together in September and October, do the bulk of the work on the project in November, and wrap things up in early December.

This will look and feel like an on-line course. We’ll meet and interact in virtual spaces. I’ll host an optional meeting on Friday afternoons (my time) from September 14 through December 7. I’m calling those Guidebook Friday sessions. We’ll also have a drop-in anytime gathering place for people who can’t attend the meetings and for all of us to use between meetings.

For more details, keep checking my blog this week. I’ll have a new post every day. Tomorrow, I’ll talk about how The Guidebook and NaNoWriMo have worked for me.

Send me an email if you want to join a cohort of people following The Guidebook to prepare for and complete NaNoWriMo (or some other creative project) this fall. I’m at yahoo and use all three of my names smashed together as the account name.

Comment on this post if you have questions that I can address here or in a post later this week.