Plant It, Pay It Off How to track the plot threads that run across a series, so you don't leave a promise hanging in book two. Okay, so this one is about a feeling I think every series writer has had. You plant something in book one, a letter, a scar, a missing ring, and then you write three more books and it never comes back. Nobody noticed in the moment. Then a reader does, and they tell you about it in the comments. Ugh. I've done it. Everybody who writes a long series has done it. Sigh. The good news is that WordCrafter.Pro has a place to keep track of this stuff, and it's not complicated. It's a list, a few brackets, and a habit of checking it. WHAT A LONG-RANGE THREAD IS A thread is a question the reader is carrying from one book to the next. Who signed the ledger? Where is the brother? Why did the lighthouse keeper lie? These are the things that make someone buy book two. Threads that run across the whole series go in a section of your Series Bible called Long-Range Threads. The Series Bible lives in the first book of your series, so that's where you'll open it. STEP ONE: FIND THE SECTION 1. Open the first book in your series. 2. Find the Series Bible document in the Binder. It's read-only when you look at it from a later book, so do your editing here. 3. Scroll to the heading that says Long-Range Threads. If you don't see the heading yet, add it. Use the same words so the app can find it. STEP TWO: WRITE ONE LINE PER THREAD Each thread gets its own line, with the details in square brackets. It goes like this: - Who signed the harbour ledger [open; planted Bk 1; payoff Bk 2] - The lighthouse keeper's brother [advancing; planted Bk 1; payoff Bk 3] Read that as three parts. First, what the thread is. Second, its status. Third, which book it starts in and which book it pays off in. STEP THREE: PICK A STATUS You have four choices, and the words have to match exactly. - open means the thread is waiting to be picked up. - advancing means the thread is moving but not finished. - resolved means the thread has been paid off. - dropped means you've decided it isn't going anywhere, on purpose.