When keeping track of plot needs more than pen and paper…
For someone who writes far future high action scifi, I’m quite old school. Very old school. I love writing in a notebook with a freshly sharpened pencil. I love it when my notebooks become so battered, they start to fall apart and I have to glue them together to keep going. But nine books into a series of complex, interweaving storylines where a one liner in one book becomes of immense importance three or four or five books on, keeping track of everything is getting more and more tricky. Add in a delightful soupy mix of brain fog and fatigue, and I’m finding that my memory is totally addled. At one point, I forgot the names of my seven corporations. Not such a big deal until you consider I’ve been writing about this universe and those organisations for over thirty years. Last year I spent three full days trawling through books and notebooks trying to track and account for a single item. Early on, I used to use listed timelines whe
