The last few weeks have been an uneasy one here in New Zealand and we’ve been hit with the second wave of Covid-19. So far, the virus appears to be only in the Auckland area which is lockdown in level 3. The rest of the country is in level 2 which means social distancing but not so many restrictions. We’re waiting for the PMs announcement this Friday to see where we go from here.

Writing wise, this has been a month for co-written projects. I’ve just finished edits on Family and Reflection, book 3 of The Sleepless City series I wrote with Elizabeth Noble. We’re excited to share this series with you again and that they’re all be in KU this time around.

Although the series is finishing, we haven’t said good-bye to our characters. We both have spin-off series set in the same world. Because of this, we’ve decided to keep an online bible that we’ll both add to as we write new books as it’s important to keep the continuity, and world rules straight.

We looked into a couple of options for how we were going to do this and have gone with a Trello board. We’ve both already used Trello so are familiar with and it has several cool options to make it our own as The Sleepless City shared world expands.

Lou Sylvre and I are also in planning mode working out the plot for our second Magic in the Isles book. We’ll be using Trello for that too, and for planning our next New Zealand Romance. It’s so much easier to have everything in one place, and I really like the visual aspect of Trello, rather than trolling through emails for information I could have sworn I sent and can’t find.

Lou has also put me onto Asana, which I’m going to test out as a place to keep notes for my two big projects next year—the repubbing and finishing of my Hidden Places and Dragons of Astria series.

I still love my notebooks and find them invaluable as I’m writing, so am looking at Trello and Asana more as places for series bibles.

For day to day planning I still wouldn’t go past a hardcopy planner. On that note I’ve just discovered a wonderful New Zealand product called The Key Planner, which I’m about to start using. I did try a day-per-page diary for the earlier part of this year but because each page was packed full, it made it very difficult to find anything. I’m excited to try this out.

I’d love to know what your go-to planners are, both hardcopy and online.

Meantime I’d love to see some of you in my readers group and/or signing up for my newsletter.