The thing that I found most useful was the lecture on storylining or outlining.  I'm a pantster.  I get a vague idea and open a new file and hope for the best.  It never occurred to me that it was wasteful, but after listening to that lecture, I realized I really was wasting a lot of time and effort.  Why?  Okay, when I was working on Moving Atlantis, I got about half way through and realized I hated a good chunk of the story.  I cut it back to less than half of what I had and man was that painful.  Imagine if that was a novel length story?  Ouch!  Hundreds of pages, months of work, cut out because the story wasn't working.  If I had storylined, I'd have worked through those issues ahead of time, and figured out how to make the story work with a proper plot etc.

And how many times have I sat staring at the screen going "what now?"  I can get to a point where I have no clue what the next step should be and it stalls me for weeks.  

Anyway, so now I'm going back and outlining the stalled stories, or at least a few to get me started.  Then I can see what research I need to do and work the little bits into the story properly rather than getting to a spot and realizing "oh crap, I don't know anything about that." then after doing the research realizing I have to cut out a bunch because I'd made a lot of factual errors.

All seems obvious huh?  I'm slow that way.  It's pretty natural to want to get actual words on a page, to have progress to report.  *grin* And I have no willpower, so I'm sure I'll break a bit and start actual writing, but my goal is to start actually planning rather than running into a story blind.

Ta, off to canoe now!