Here’s the Plan (2021 Edition)

Ah, the smell of a fresh new year. So crisp, so clean, so innocent!

Over the course of several recent dog-walking excursions, Kent and Jen developed their master plan for 2021. The first item on the agenda is finishing the edits on Grandson of Science Novel. We had originally hoped to wrap it up in 2020, but that didn’t quite happen, so we’ll take a couple of weeks now and knock it out.

As the dust settles from that, we’ll decamp to the Auxiliary Writing Cave and dig in on plotting our new Ghost Series. We have a bazillion notes — some in longhand, some electronic. Once those have been wrangled into order, we’ll start at the beginning and flesh the whole thing out. This will likely take quite some time, since it’s looking like it’s going to be a 4-book series (quadrilogy? tetralogy?). Somehow, this is the first time we’ve planned an entire series at once and we want to make sure we do it right. The Auxiliary Writing Cave has comfy furniture and a fireplace (and a hidden bookcase), and is the perfect place to enjoy a hot beverage, with or without alcohol, so we’re quite excited about it.

After the plotting we have a split in the flowchart. If we’re feeling excited and energized about all things ghostly, we’ll jump in and start writing the first book in the series. On the other hand, if we feel a little wrung out, and like the batteries need some time to recharge, we’ll switch gears and edit Sibling of Music Novel.

If there’s still time left in the year after that, we’ll do whichever task we skipped in the last step.

And in our copious free time, we’ll start to figure out the next big concept to fill the void when the Ghost Series is done.

That plan should keep us quite happily occupied all year, but it could all go out the window. Our agent is shopping two novels for us, and when a publisher bites there will probably be one or two things they’d like us to do. A little upheaval for a good cause? Sign us up!