My Vocal Media "Editorial Calendar"

My first few days on Vocal Media were euphorically frenetic. Incredibly excited after making my decision to finally DO THIS!, I poured out three posts in three days and basically couldn’t stop myself from spending all day writing. Also, my mind was simply bursting with more post ideas, which I wrote down in an unorganized fashion on a notepad and multiple random pieces of paper.

After this, I felt like I needed to take a break for a couple days so I could actually get organized and strategic about this. I needed a way to organize my ideas and plan when to write and post them.

Enter: The plan! I grandiosely call this my editorial calendar.

I chose to organize my notes in this mini notebook/binder because I want to be able to move pages around easily yet don't want or need something as large as a normal binder. In this mini binder, I have a section of overall notes followed by a section of monthly planning pages.

Here's an example from the overall notes section: the list of communities I expect to post in often:

Monthly Planning

This has been the most important part of my process.

First, I decided what I want to post in each month. For example, there are some things I want to post ASAP, some NaNoWriMo-themed things to post in November, and some New Year-themed things to post in January.

Then, I had to decide on the order. I've based this on a variety of factors including challenge deadlines, my own schedule, and maintaining a balance of content. The three main topics for my "blog" here are reading, writing, and life (mostly in the realms of mental health, career, and motivational content), so I want to make sure that I have a good balance of posts about each of these topics in my writing schedule. I especially want to make sure I consistently post about reading, novel writing, and inspiration/motivation.

Here is the list of September post topics after I decided on my posting order for this month:

And here is how I have scheduled the content plan into my calendar:

I have now planned out all of my post topics for September, almost all of my topics for October and November, and more seasonally themed posts for up to 1 year from now. I also have a Word document of many other, unscheduled ideas to potentially write about at some time in the future. My plan is to post 2 times per week, other than breaks for holidays. I hope you'll enjoy! :)

Stay tuned for my next two posts, which will be an entry in the “First Thing I Ever Wrote” challenge and a review of Parker Pyne Investigates by Agatha Christie combined with my thoughts on short story collections. [update: here is my First Piece I Ever Wrote entry and here is my piece about Parker Pyne and short stories.]

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How do you plan your Vocal Media posts or other writing/content? Or, do you prefer to keep it unplanned and wait for inspiration to strike? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below! :)

Also, I'm definitely not short of ideas, but I am always open to more. Let me know if you have any story ideas you'd like me to add to my calendar!

P.S. On Tuesday (2 days ago), I got a biopsy done on a suspicious mole on my foot, so there’s a chance that the biopsy results will end up derailing these plans (hopefully not!!!), but I’ll keep you updated. (The doctor said it may take up to 10 business days to get results.) [edit: see update here]