Happy autumn, one and all!

I don’t have yoga pants, but I’ll tell you all my favorite things about fall…

I’m gearing up for a busy end-of-year, what with a finished manuscript for The Dark Interest almost ready to ship out to the publisher, a short story for an anthology nearing completion, and another short story in edits…all with the release of The Curse Mandate (Book 3 of the Dark Choir series) ready to release on December 19th!

Phew.

As I look back, I’m reminded of some of the most popular posts I made on this blog, namely the Pre-Writing worksheets I posted up years ago. After so long, I feel it’s a good time to dust these off and revisit them.

And so…I shall! This Sunday at 4pm EST, I’ll be joining K.M. Robinson at Reading Transforms for a live broadcast, during which we’ll walk through the character creation, plot outline and scene worksheets I’ve posted on this blog. Come click and join us!

In the meantime, here is a list of links to my old blog posts for reference. Take a look, and feel free to use and adapt these tools as you see fit.

First the intro, “On Pre-writing”:
https://jp-sloan.com/2011/05/06/on-pre-writing/
Then four pages breaking down my character worksheets:
https://jp-sloan.com/2011/09/30/tools-for-pre-writing-character-worksheet-part-1/
https://jp-sloan.com/2011/10/04/tools-for-pre-writing-character-worksheet-part-2/
https://jp-sloan.com/2011/10/07/tools-for-pre-writing-character-worksheet-part-3/
https://jp-sloan.com/2011/10/11/tools-for-pre-writing-character-worksheet-part-4/
Then a post about plot outlining, with a sample:
https://jp-sloan.com/2011/08/25/the-skeleton-of-a-story/

And the piece de resistance… the scene worksheets, which are the real workhorses of my left-brained pre-writing system:
https://jp-sloan.com/2011/09/08/tools-for-pre-writing-dissecting-the-scene-worksheet/