I may be taking a few weeks off before continuing with my next novel project, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been thinking about my projects or fooling around with some interesting tools, books, and such in the meantime. So I just thought I’d share a quick run-down of some of the things I’ve been toying with recently:

The Marshall Plan Software – The Marshall Plan for Novel Writing was the very first novel outlining system I used (and still my favorite, despite trying two other interesting plans). Evan Marshall got in touch not long ago to let me know he converted the plan into software. Cool, huh? I usually prefer doing my outlining by hand, but I’ve been starting to play with this. For now, I’m just trying to get used to it and how it works. When I get back to my writing work I’ll either be editing the outline I did under the Marshall Plan or I’ll be drafting another book. If I do the editing, I decided that I’ll move the hand-written outline into the software as I make changes to use it a bit more fully.

1001 Character Quirks – Before outlining Three Weeks I purchased a character trait / character quirk product through ClickBank. It’s essentially a huge list of character quirks (which came in handy when having to plot 15 male characters in that story). It was a lot of fun to peruse – definitely recommended.

I’ve also been spending time reading a variety of mystery writing books – nothing terribly exciting to share on that front. I’m just trying to make sure I haven’t missed important elements and such before moving on with edits to the dark mystery outline I’ve put together.