I hope this update finds you well. The Eclipse of 2024 nearly brought an end to all mankind. This was my third eclipse, though there might have been a fourth that I don’t remember. I remember the 1984 eclipse in part because it happened around the time of my Papaw’s death. The last one was just a few years ago when we were moving between homes. What have I been up to? A new series idea. The reason I mentioned a series notebook last week was because I started tinkering with a dark fantasy setting. Since there aren’t different grades of dark fantasy, and since this series might not be dark enough, I’m thinking it will be more milk chocolate fantasy (as opposed to dark chocolate). There, I’ve made it a thing. Okay, maybe I should have thought about a flatter image. But if you’re curious how I organize my thoughts, that’s as good a graphic as I can share. Don’t let the length of it fool you, there are a lot of blanks in the outline. But sections like 22.04 and 22.08 are well developed. 21.01-03 are summaries, with 21.03 (mis-identified and obfuscated) being the placeholder for a four-book outline. [notebook-2024-04-09.png] I spent a lot of time this past week using ChatGPT and Claude AI with research. I could spend my days trolling through Wikipedia, which is its own time suck. Or, I could ask AI to give me a summary in a format that was useful to worldbuilding. Having once tinkered with developing a tabletop role-playing game, I incorporated the magic system. I used AI to strip away the game mechanics and help me think out implications of...

Are you a speculative fiction writer looking to create a captivating fantasy or sci-fi series? Do you struggle to keep track of your story-world's intricate details, character arcs, and overarching themes? If so, it's time to consider creating a Series Notebook. A Series Notebook is a comprehensive tool that helps you develop and maintain consistency throughout your speculative fiction series. It serves as a centralized resource that details the scope, rules, concepts, themes, characters and parameters of the story-world in which your series takes place. By having all this information organized and easily accessible, you can focus on crafting engaging stories without getting lost in the details. The "series bibles" used in television production inspire my use of a Series Notebook. These bibles are contain all the key information about a TV series, including character profiles, plot outlines and worldbuilding elements. They ensure everyone involved in the production, from writers to actors to set designers, clearly understands the series' vision and maintains consistency across episodes and seasons. Authors such as Brian Sanderson have reference to their use of series notebooks. When I was at the 20 Books Vegas conference in 2022, a panel of sci-fi authors mentioned they write about 50-75,000 words about the setting before they start the first novel. It is useful for managing your worldbuilding. (BTW, author James Peet has a good presentation on geography and worldbuilding.) This would fit with the use of a series notebook. The notebook helps me organize my writing process. I've used one in various forms over the years, both in Scrivener and Markdown/GitHub. Here's how I organize mine, roughly: 1. Overview (tagline, premise, target audience, genre and tropes, themes and motifs)...