Our friends at Renaissance Art are doing weekly giveaways. This week's item happens to be especially droolworthy.

Leave a comment to THIS POST to enter your name for the random drawing. You could be the owner of a prototype of one of their new discbound cover lines. This cranberry red leather cover fits a 8.5" X 5.5", 3/4" disc discbound notebook. It has 2 extra interior pockets and a pen loop. The link also has a picture of the prize, so be sure to go read and check it out.

Arthur has this to say about the new covers:

The new line will be fun, innovative and while elegant, not the same ole corporate looking stuff everyone else is carrying. PLUS... it is made right here in our Santa Fe, NM studios and not at some overseas factory in China. So, you know the quality will be superior and...since we make everything to order you will be able to TWEAK it.

"When the well's dry, we know the worth of water." - Benjamin Franklin

I used to store a lot of my articles-in-progress in Google Docs so I could work on them from any computer, but lately I've migrated most of them into regular ole' text files that sync amongst all my laptops using Dropbox (even my Linux boxes). That way I can edit HTML text in Emacs or TextMate, keep graphics and photos handy, and easily organize them in a logical directory structure. The system is working quite well, but it assumes that I have a decent memory for all those things that came before. (I don't. This is why I write things down.)

I was working on a rather involved article this long weekend. Despite my exhaustion at the time and the complexity of its structure, the words and the shaping of the concepts came quite freely. So much so, that I was feeling quite proud of myself. I was about three-quarters of the way through the rough draft when I said out loud, "This is going unbelievably well. It's almost like I wrote it before...." I paused. I thought about what I just....

Well... erm... that is... *cough*.

What I wrote was basically a carbon-copy of my old Simpleton and the Grail post from my much-fallow a million monkeys typing blog. In my defense, it was four years ago, and it didn't show up in my DIYPlanner.com search.

But the experience begs a question: am I just recycling myself? I know that some of us here tend to drift towards the same themes again and again (a lament I've heard Merlin bemoan on several occasions), and maybe those well-travelled paths form ruts that allow the carriage-driver to fall asleep at the reins, knowing that the horse knows the way. Sometimes it's hard to keep up the energy needed to spend a few hours writing when the scenery is the same.

To that end, I'm looking for ideas. What sort of articles would you like to see here on DIYPlanner? What reviews, what techniques, what products, what angles should we pursue?

Please tell us what you'd like to see, no matter how small, how grandiose, how wacky, how insignificant, or how out-of-place it might seem. Let's refill the well of our inspiration. Leave us your ideas.

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!

Sorry for the blip, folks. We had a hardware issue but good ole' Patrick came through yet again and made the world right.

While I'm here, it's time I gave you fine folks a little update on my mysterious disappearance and what's coming up. Nothing to do with a clever anti-analog campaign by the digirati, nor an insidious blackmail attempt by those planner companies hawking non-free templates. Although either would have been a pleasant distraction.

In my day-job, I lead the new media division of a mid-sized marketing/ communications company in Canada's far north. Many of our clients have a March 31st deadline for their projects if government funding is involved in any way, and typically we could have a dozen or so large projects clogging our pipes from January till the end of March. This year we had several times that, and boy, were we busy. Not just insanely busy, but 'how the heck are we even dreaming of doing all that work' busy. But I have an efficient and dedicated team with talents I couldn't even begin to laud, and they came through once again, delivering great work on time and on budget. So now the craziness is over, and we can all rush madly to the bathroom stalls and urinals and heave great collective sighs of relief.

The past few weeks have been a whirlwind for me. In January, I got asked to participate in a special limited edition anthology to help benefit musician SJ Tucker, who had medical issues in 2008. I accepted the offer and prepped my story for publication. For awhile now, most of my time has been focused around helping market, publicize, and spread the word about the book. Last Thursday the editors (Phil Brucato and Sandra Buskirk) announced that the book arrived from the printers and on Saturday, I drove to Seattle to help box books with 16 passionate people.

Many of you who have visited my personal website already know about this book and how excited I've been. For those of you who do not, I'd like to introduce you all to RAVENS IN THE LIBRARY. A compilation dedicated to SJ Tucker, born out of love for music, magic, and the muse. This special VERY limited edition book has been compiled to defray the medical expenses and recovery of musician S.J. Tucker. The anthology will NOT be released in stores, and it is NOT downloadable! It will be available only as long as those expenses remain unresolved. After that, RAVENS IN THE LIBRARY will disappear. Along with my story, it features stories written by many of my favorite writers including Newberry Award winner Neil Gaiman, Charles de Lint, Holly Black, and Francesca Lia Block. Order your copy today and help a good cause!

This is big news for me and for my writing career. I'm excited to have been apart of this anthology and hope that it's the first of many new works published by me. This is also the reason why I've sort of disappeared from this site and have not been regularly getting posts or reviews up for your enjoyment. I have a quite a backlog of reviews that I am working my way through, so expect more from me as soon as I can get things written. Before I wrap this plug up, I'd like to also announce that I will be signing copies of RAVENS in Seattle this Wednesday, March 25th, at The Dreaming Comics in the University District. So if you are local to the Seattle area (or even Portland, Oregon) come on up, meet me (and many of the other authors/artists) and get your own copy of Ravens.

Thanks to everyone for your continued support to D*I*Y Planner and for being patient with me as I struggle to find the balance between the publication, writing posts here, and editing my first novel.

These are tabbed dividers (I've always called them "tabbies", is that odd?) that you can print and cut out yourself, 2 to a page, for classic size planners. I'm not a fan of the plastic stick-on things, for some reason I like plain old-fashioned card stock paper dividers, so I bothered to make this.

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New Year, new templates. The D*I*Y Planner Dynamic Template application has now hit version 2.0, ready to produce any size and shape of yearly, monthly, weekly, and daily calendars for your printing pleasure. All designs are based upon the Classic versions of the D*I*Y Planner, along with input from Doug, and so will integrate completely into your DiyP setup. (The daily design was created by Doug, but was never implemented as a static template owing to the insane amount of repetitive work required.)

Simply select your paper size, choose the calendar type, and tweak the settings to come up with your own printable set of calendars that perfectly fit your planner and your lifestyle.

Here's a shot of the Mac version as it starts up:

My days are task and information heavy, with the occasional appointment. On my perpetual quest for the perfect planner, I was browsing the Paper Chase planners and notebooks at Borders when I came across their page per day diaries, a simple lined page with the date at the top that allows you to write whatever and however you want. Two days ago, a forum topic here led me to the Quo Vadis website which had a page per day diary format with a little bit of space for appointments. My first submission to DIYP is my attempt at both of those formats.

We at D*I*Y Planner wish you all a safe and wonderful holiday season. This year, I made a fun desktop for everyone to enjoy. Happy holidays and see you next week.