I use Excel to plot my stories (something my mates all make fun of me for). In each draft of each book I mess about with the order of chapters and scenes, add and delete whole sections. ‘Dead Man’s Blues’ had seven drafts. I took screenshots of each draft’s plot as I worked it in Excel and stuck them together here to show the evolution of a plot. Each cell is a chapter and each cell is coloured according to its POV character. Not sure what happened with the 2nd draft.
craft
Editing…

What editing looks like… I think this is from a round of edits on the 6th or 7th draft of the new book. The published version will be the 9th draft. Much of the stuff I’m cleaning up on this page ended up getting cut from the final version anyway. My process is massively inefficient.
The Mobster’s Lament Bubble Map
I opened up my sketchpad to start making a bubble map for book 4 of the quartet and found the one I did for book 3…