Bipolar Disorder, also known as Manic Depression, is considered by the psychiatric community to be a mood disorder and is classified as a mental illness. It is characterized by extreme and unpredictable shifts in mood as sufferers cycle through bouts of mania followed by depression.

Like most diseases, the severity of BD varies from person to person. In severe cases classified as Bipolar I a patient will experience full blown mania (characterized by rapid speech, racing thoughts, decreased need for sleep, hypersexuality, euphoria, psychosis, grandiosity, irritability, and increased interest in goal-directed activities) in an alternating cycle with clinical depression (characterized by fatigue, anxiety, guilt, anger, hopelessness, sadness, apathy, depersonalization, melancholy and suicidal ideation).

A person with Bipolar Disorder is 10 to 20 times more at risk for death by suicide than the average “normal” person. In fact persons diagnosed as Bipolar II (instead of manic they experience hypomania but spend more time in a Major Depression state than Bipolar I) have higher rates of suicide compared to other mental health conditions including sufferers of straight Major Depression.

Current studies into Bipolar Disorder say many things. One of those is that as much as 50% of adult sufferers of BD manifested symptoms as children (17 and under). There is a growing concern about catching BD early because some research claims that BD, like depression, is the result of a deficiency in the brain. However BD cannot be cured only managed through the use of medication.

Okay we already talked about how to organize your writing ideas and we’ve gone over the many ways in which you can keep track of them when you are away from your office. Now we are going to talk about different ways in which you can keep track of ideas while working on a collaborative writing project.

I’ve never worked on a collaborative writing project. I’m more of a solo artist myself. However, in speaking with other writers, I get the feeling that participating in a collaborative writing project is both fun and frustrating. Fun because bringing people together from different walks of life often offers fresh and humorous perspective on the writing idea as a whole. At the same time the frustration comes in because attempting to keep a bunch of creative people on track is a little like trying to herd cats. All but impossible.

While I can’t really help you with the cat herding thing, I can offer some ways of getting your group together for jam sessions as well as suggestions for keeping track of things when all is said and done.

This week we are going to focus on descriptions. Movies and television have it easy when it comes to describing things. All they need to do is project the image they want on the screen and the viewer instantly sees it. In books, however, it’s the descriptions that must do the heavy lifting of engaging the reader’s imagination and really bring a book to life. That’s why as writers, it is important that we choose our words carefully so that not only is the reader able to visualize our characters, scenes and events but that those impressions also get interpreted correctly.So this week’s writing prompts focus on honing your description skills. You can either create a whole story out of these prompts or just describe the situation these prompts focus on.

One of the most frequently posted design questions on blog forums and help sites has to do with the fact that the sidebar suddenly disappears after a user places something (usually an image) in their sidebar. There are a couple interrelated reasons for this.

Problem: Missing end tags.

No matter how perfect the code is in your template, one tag out of place can make the whole thing implode like a poorly baked soufflé.

Answer: Validate your code using the W3C code validator and fix any errors that come up.

Problem: The image is too big for the space provided.

Last week we talked about a couple of ways in which you can capture your ideas as quickly as your highly developed imaginative minds can churn them out. Now we are going to talk about different methods of corralling those unruly puppies in your home office. Each of these systems will help you track both general writing ideas and specific works in progress.

1. The Notebook System

This system is perhaps the simplest way of keeping track of your ideas. All you need for this system are stacks of notebooks, a marker pen and empty space on your bookshelf. This was my system years ago before I got my first computer.

All I did was label each notebook with the aspect of writing that it concentrated on. For example, one notebook could be labeled “Characters”, another “Plots” and so on and so forth. Then it became a matter of transferring the notes from their temporary home in my pocket to their permanent home in the office.

One disadvantage of this system is that when I wanted to find something I had to flip through pages and pages of written text which, inevitably, took forever because I would get distracted from what I was looking for by thoughts of all that I could with the other ideas I was flipping past. Therefore if you have a computer, as I and most people do, I recommend the electronic version of this system.