As a winner of the National Novel Writing Month, you get a bunch of discount codes for a variety of different writing and organizing programs. My brother started telling me about one in particular which immediately grabbed my attention, it’s called AOE Timeline.

So far I have mostly been outlining details in my outlines for each individual book. This has been helpful in keeping things organized, however when I mention events that took place prior to the start of the first book, I only mention them where they’re supposed to be mentioned. In other words, I have not designed an appropriate chronological time line that has displayed the order of events prior to and at the start of book 1.

Naturally, because of this, the AOE Timeline program peaked my interest. I started looking into it and then downloaded it shortly after. I’ve been playing around with it for the last day or so (in the spare few minutes I’ve had), and I’ve found it so far very helpful. I can outline the time lines of different characters, the main plot points and events, and everything that happens prior to book 1 with more precise and specific information. I can also associate each time line and where they all intersect at different points. This is so unbelievably helpful and fun that I think everything will start looking better just by me doing this. The specifics have mostly just been in my head, and now I can organize it onto a program in detail.

Anyway, this just made me happy that I felt it necessary to talk about it. I use Scrivener for writing and outlining and the general organization of chapters and scenes (fantastic program by the way, I highly recommend it), and I’m now using AOE Timeline to outline specific dates and details in chronological order. Fun.