Free is best. And it’s actually really nice to actually lay out the timeline.
As I’ve mentioned in previous posts (She’s being rude, but why is she being rude? Tension.) I paused forward motion for a little while to do housekeeping and worldbuilding I didn’t do enough of before starting. (See my last post about pantsing not working out. Well, not entirely)
By training I’m a project manager. I’m a PMP, which is a fun thing to put on business cards. It’s hard out here. That makes me professionally inclined to want a timeline. I have an aversion to ambiguity. It bugs me even when I don’t need to set that timeline in stone for the story. I just need to know, you know?
So I started looking for timeline tools. And, praise be to the internet, I found one that does everything I want.
Timeline Tool
It’s Free Fantasy Timeline & Calendar Maker from a company called Legend Keeper. FYI, I have no affiliation with this company and they are not compensating me for this. I just wanted to share the tool.
It lets you set up any number of events and have multiple tracks. It looks like the paid version is intended to be used for role-playing games. But it works just fine for getting everything straight in my head. And it tracks moon phases, which is super useful in a werewolf book.
Here’s what it looks like, in no detail.
You can seen the swimlanes to track various types of events. This is an online tool. You can save your work locally.
Anyway, I took me some tries to find one I liked so I thought I’d share.
Here’s today’s progress and a context-free quote.
Date 4/8/2026
Words (Draft) 1055
Words (Elsewhere) -44
Words (Total) 1011
Characters (Draft) 5997
Characters (Elsewhere) -280
Characters (Total) 5717
Session Target 968
They gathered by the back door, out of Zeb’s way. He gave them a curious look but saw Patricia’s expression and went back to cooking.
“Stanislav,” Rae-Lynn told her. “I smelled him at all the cabins we checked.”
Patricia looked at Mark. “Where’d you leave the fliers?”