William Wallace Cook was a pulp fiction writer whose output was so prolific that he was called "the man who deforested Canada." He was an early adopter of many then-new technologies. He was one of the first writers to compose on a typewriter and to use card files to index an enormous collection of magazine and newspaper clippings.

Plotto is an extension of Cook's passion for efficiency and method in writing.

Norton Creek Press has also published Cook's autobiography, The Fiction Factory, (under the pseudonym of John Milton Edwards), which covers the first half of his writing career in detail.

Born in Michigan 1878, at one point Cook moved to Arizona for his health, and the Old West ambiance he soaked up there allowed him to become a much-sought-after writer of Westerns.

Cook's interest in technology no doubt was the source of his science fiction novels, such as "A Round Trip to the Year 2000," written before SF was an established genre.

And this means that it will come as no surprise that Cook wrote screenplays for early silent movies, starting in 1912 with "It All Came Out in the Wash."

Cook's most famous work is the Plotto plot-suggestion tool.

Cook died in Kansas of pneumonia in 1935.