May 2020

Most of you will be familiar with MS Word, but if you are not an author you might not know about Scrivener, New Novelist, or The Novel Factory. I do not plan on writing a detailed review or comparison of these three pieces of software, but I am going experimenting with each of them to see which will work best for me. I already own a copy of Scrivener, but I do not really like it. Part of the problem might be that it is primarily targeting Apple users, so the PC version is a bit clumsy, but it is

My writing career was put on hold in 2018, and I am just getting back to it now... during the 2020 pandemic. As part of my reboot, I have scrapped all of the existing outlines and drafts... time to start over.

Here are my preliminary writing plans for 2020:

• I am working on zombie-related horror novel now, partially to get back into writing, and partially because I am really enjoying it. I hope to have the first draft completed in July, and the second draft a month later. I am not sure if this novel will go further than that, but we will see.
• Tom and Piper Adventures will be a multi-book series, and I will start writing the first book in August, 2020. The goal will be to complete the first draft in two months, and have the second draft ready for a developmental editor no later than November, 2020.
• I have been working on two science-fiction and one fantasy outlines for years, and will try to get these outlined by the end of May. I do not have a schedule to start writing either of them, but I expect to start writing one before the end of 2020.

I will be working on a few short stories as well, mainly to experiment with some ideas I have for full length novels. I might post them here, or use them to start a short story collection at some point, but who knows.