Write Every Day: Day #12

[auroracloud]

(Uh, so it's technically the 13th here... I had this idea of going to bed early today, but guess that didn't happen.)

Does anyone know a good program or other resource for creating timelines? Specifically, something where you can create lots of different overlapping timelines... You know, such as you might need when you're planning to write a historical novel and need to keep track of what goes on in the world/nation/town/etc. as well as in your characters' lives, so you know what kind of events they might be affected by. I realized today when planning and plotting that I might need something more tailored for that purpose than just my Scrivener corkboards. I've so far been making do with timelines I've drawn on large sheets of paper, but the problem is, I still can't get all that detailed on them.

I looked at Aeon Timeline, which tentatively seemed like it might work, but while I'm sure 48 € is a fair price, I'm really low on spare money these days, so I'm open for other recommendations.

If I can't get anything that I like for a price I'm able to pay for such a thing, I guess I'll just stick lots of big sheets of paper together. (And trip over my timeline quite literally for the next few months. Hmm, this plan still needs some honing.)

Today's Writing

As can be inferred from the above, I did some planning and plotting and outlining for the novel today. Frankly, I'm getting a bit tired of planning, though - I want to get to writing! I just need to get some more things figured out with the research, and OMG get more names for people. And hopefully get more detailed timelines, yeah...

Tally

Day 1: alexcat, alexseanchai, auroracloud, carenejeans, cassini, china_shop, cornerofmadness, falkner, luzclarita, shopfront, silveradept, sylvanwitch, used_songs, ysilme

Day 2: alexcat, alexseanchai, auroracloud, carenejeans, china_shop, cornerofmadness, falkner, sierranovembr, silveradept, sylvanwitch, ysilme

Day 3: alexseanchai, auroracloud, carenejeans, cassini, china_shop, cornerofmadness, falkner, shopfront, silveradept, sylvanwitch, talkingtothesky, used_songs, ysilme

Day 4: alexcat, alexseanchai, auroracloud, carenejeans, cassini, china_shop, cornerofmadness, falkner, shopfront, sylvanwitch, tinx_r, ysilme

Day 5: alexseanchai, alexcat, auroracloud, carenejeans, cassini, china_shop, cornerofmadness, falkner, sierranovembr, silveradept, st_aurafina, sylvanwitch, yantantether, ysilme

Day 6: alexcat, alexseanchai, auroracloud, carenejeans, cassini, china_shop, cornerofmadness, ellieet, silveradept, sylvanwitch, talkingtothesky, yantantether, ysilme

Day 7: alexcat, alexseanchai, auroracloud, carenejeans, cassini, china_shop, cornerofmadness, ellieet, sierranovembr, silveradept, st_aurafina, sylvanwitch, ysilme, yantantether (14 so far)

Day 8: alexcat, alexseanchai, auroracloud, carenejeans, cassini, china_shop, cornerofmadness, ellieet, sierranovembr, silveradept, sylvanwitch, talkingtothesky, yantantether, ysilme (14 so far)

Day 9: alexcat, alexseanchai, auroracloud, carenejeans, cassini, china_shop, cornerofmadness, shopfront, sierranovembr, silveradept, st_aurafina, sylvanwitch, talkingtothesky, yantantether, ysilme (15 so far)

Day 10: alexcat, alexseanchai, auroracloud, carenejeans, cassini, china_shop, cornerofmadness, navaan, silveradept, st_aurafina, sylvanwitch, talkingtothesky, yantantether, ysilme (14 so far)

Day 11: alexcat, alexseanchai, auroracloud, carenejeans, cassini, china_shop, cornerofmadness, navaan, sierranovembr, silveradept, st_aurafina, sylvanwitch, talkingtothesky, yantantether, ysilme (15 so far)

Day 12: china_shop

Comments

[yantantether]

I had a really good writing day! I wrote 600 words of one fic, which finished the first draft, and then wrote about 900 words of something new.

[auroracloud]

That sounds like a good writing day, indeed. Congratulations for all that creativity and productivity!

[alexseanchai]

I'm coding a Twine game to figure out Miraculous Ladybug canon-compliant chronology? Dunno if helpful? (I can show you the draft game and its code if you like?)

No words yet

[alexseanchai]

I tweaked a thing and I'm stuck on how to get back on outline because the way this scene ought to go, based on what it makes sense for Adrien to do next in order to get to the conversation wherein the next major plot point happens, is so very not the way it happens in my head!

[alexseanchai]

There, real words. Almost a solid thousand of them. On some other damn thing, of course, but at least it is a complete damn thing?

[auroracloud]

Woo, lots of real words! And a complete damn thing is good, even if it's a different damn thing than you meant! :-)

[alexseanchai]

\o/

someone reblogged the thing on tumblr with the tags "this is soft" and "they're THAT couple" and

I melt

bc yes that is the exact reaction I wanted this lil fluff romancey bit to get

[auroracloud]

Aww yay, I'm glad you got such a reaction! ♥

[auroracloud]

That sounds interesting. If you don't mind showing the draft game, I would gladly take a look at how it works, to see if I could make it work for my purpose. :-) Thanks for offering!

[alexseanchai]

Okay so if you download this .html file off Google Drive and open it in your browser (should work on mobile but I've only tried on desktop), that is the current draft of the game itself. This Google Doc is the code for the important bit.

What's going on here is, some episodes are consecutive. Like, Origins 1 has to be first, so that's the only place you can go at first. Origins 2 has to be second, so that's the only place you can go from Origins 1. Later, Collector starts immediately after Volpina, so the only place you can go from Volpina is Collector.

Other episodes definitely occur sequentially. Like, you can't get to Evillustrator until you've gone to both Stormy Weather and Lady Wifi, because the title characters of those episodes (1) first appear in the respective episodes (2) are seen in Evillustrator. (fsvo 'first appear'—Lady Wifi is Alya, who is in nearly every episode—but I assume you're not here for an explanation of what's going on in canon, though I also assume you know you're about to get spoiled to hell and gone if you're coming in with no canon knowledge.) And there's a lot you can't get to before Pixelator because a key character in those episodes first appears in Pixelator. (Or so I assume because another recurring character didn't recognize him at first in Pixelator. The said character recognizes him fine in Darkblade, which aired earlier and is also earlier in US Netflix's viewing order. You see why this show's chronology gives me fits!)

Other episodes...well, they definitely occur at some point? We can make guesses on when based on how the characters are interacting—judging by how Marinette behaves around Adrien, Bubbler is way earlier than Gigantitan—but we can't actually prove it? (also, crap, I need to fix the code because Bubbler is definitely before Despair Bear and I only just realized that...and now I have fixed the code in Twine but I can't be bothered updating the doc or the upload, so)

So if a particular episode does not appear in your game history, and all the episodes that definitely occur before that episode do, then you are able to visit that episode. This adds the episode to your history and appends the episode name to the array. When you return to the screen that you're seeing code here for—as you must do after every episode, unless (1) there is only one possible next episode, as with Volpina, in which case you go to that episode next (2) there is a very probable next episode (like, I'm pretty sure Guitar Villain is right on Pixelator's heels), but "probable" isn't "certain", so the probable next episode is an option next to returning to the main list—the code runs again. That updates the list of available episodes for you to go to next, and shows the array of the episodes you've already gone to in the order you've gone to them.

Clear as mud, right?

[sylvanwitch]

I'm afraid I have no timeline suggestions, but that is a good point to be making, re: historical novels. I hope you find something affordable that satisfies your needs. :-)

We had a good day outside at two different state parks, with a late picnic lunch included. It was lovely--cool and sunny and breezy and delightful! Before we hit the road for the day, I added 1059 words to the H50 fic AND connected in the sex scene I mentioned writing earlier in the week. Guess I found a place for it after all.

[auroracloud]

Ooh, that sounds like a very nice outing day! Glad you were able to enjoy the outdoors that much. And congrats for also managing to write lots of words and connect the sex scene. :-)

[cassini]

[managed to make up some of that deficit today, killed a couple more innocent bystanders to keep a chapter rolling and got 1.7k words out of it. i thank them for their contribution ]

[and omgs names - anyone else leave those things until real late in the game? 68k words into this thing and several people are still going by pseudonyms and initials over here ]

[auroracloud]

Glad you were able to make some use of the contribution of those innocent bystanders, hee! I'm a terribly unmurderous writer for the most part, I've noticed.

Well, a lot of the time my character surnames are something I just slap on so I can get ahead with writing. One of the problems of writing historical fiction, at least in the time periods I mostly move in, is that everyone tends to get called Miss Such-and-Such, Mrs This, Captain That, so you need to have surnames. I've noticed that if I use a name in the draft for a long time, I tend to get so used to it that it's hard to change. So that's why I'd like to have them settled before I start writing. But I do sometimes write with just initials or some such. Also, I remember reading somewhere that the main character of the Lord of the Rings was called Bingo quite far into Tolkien's drafts, until he decided maybe Frodo would sound more heroic and fit for an epic. So you're not alone.

[hrj]

I once designed the user specifications for what I'd want in a timeline program for plotting complex novels. (Especially for pantsers who need to keep track of the anchored bits and the relative bits, but have large unfilled plot-spaces where you mostly need to know how you're constrained.) As far as I know, no such thing exists (at least the version I dreamed up) although an online friend did some poking at the idea for a while. The original user specs are in my journal somewhere but I"m not sure how I'd manage to track down the entry at this point!

[auroracloud]

Thank you for your input! Too bad that no such thing seems to exist - unless someone else turns up something that I could use, I guess I'll work around it in some way. I'm somewhere midway between a planner and a pantser - I like to figure out lots of things about the character backgrounds, the world etc. first, let the story grow in my mind before I start writing, and set down scene ideas especially for the early part of the novel, but I also come up with plenty of it during the writing - and also for that, it'd be important to have the history timelines well documented! I've been able to make Scrivener work pretty well for my plotting and planning needs, but I can't find any useful way to deal with timelines in it.

And I bet it's hard to track down entries from years ago! At least unless you happen to have super-amazingly organized tags (I know I don't).

Q

[hrj]

I do tag my entries pretty consistently, I just don't know which of the 400 entries tagged "writing" it might be!

The specific timeline problem I was trying to solve was how to manage a complex, twisty, multi-character, broad-geographic-scope plot and still write in a fairly pantsy manner. The "dream timeline program" I envisioned was one where you'd have groups of entities (e.g., characters, locations)and those entities could have relationships (relative distances, things they knew or had experienced, etc.). The time-based relationships could either be anchored to specific points in a timeline (person A is in city B on date C) or could have > or < relationships (event X has to happen after event Y, and also after event Z, but events Y and Z have no specific relationship to each other). Or entities could have a relative relationship without being anchored (example: character D is pregnant, therefore a sequence of events is implied even if none of them are fixed in time yet).

The idea being that you could just start writing scenes, and filling in the essential timeline content of those scenes into the program as you go. The more detailed the timeline content, the more constrained your future plot choices get. (It takes a week to travel from point M to point N so event Q can't happen until a certain date.) And if you change any of the fixed timepoints, or you add in a new relationship that involves fixed timepoints or essential sequences, then it alerts you if you've created impossibilities.

You can layer in other relevant characteristics, such as seasons, etc. so that you're prompted to know information you might need in description. I write historic fantasy that's anchored in actual history, so I'd use it to keep track of real-time events that might be relevant to my characters, as well as things like astronomical data (is there a full moon?)or particularly important in my books, movable religious celebrations.

It was the sort of timeline concept that would be far too much work to create solely for the projects I'd use it on, but might be useful for other people if someone was inspired to create it.

Re: Q

[hrj]

And an idly curious DW support person has managed to find the original entry. It has a more elaborate description of what I was trying to say above. Obviously, since the program doesn't exist except in my mind, it has no relevance to your original post, but I like closing the circle.

https://hrj.dreamwidth.org/286336.html

[cornerofmadness]

Sorry know I don't know any software like that.

I edited about 14K of Christmas crap and limped around all evening getting a sparse 178 words on summer of giles

[auroracloud]

Good for getting that much editing done!

[cornerofmadness]

Thanks, starting to type it in now

[sierranovembr]

I wrote an alibi sentence and did a little editing. Ready for the weekend, ugh.

[auroracloud]

Just one more day and the weekend will be there! Hopefully you'll get some rest and writing time then. :-)

[carenejeans]

Not much writing today. Stared at the bookshop novel for a while, and moved things around, and made edits here and there, then wrote a few alibi sentences to feel more like I'd accomplished something! Sheesh.

[auroracloud]

Some days are like that. But the staring and moving things around may also be useful later on, even if it didn't produce many words now.

[silveradept]

I think Twine, even though it's meant for interactive fiction, might be able to handle some of your timeline things and provide the rudiments of navigating between them in its code. It's not a specialized program for that in any way, shape, or form, but it might do.

I spent time cleaning up and posting fic, because someone else encouraged me to put them in multiple places, making sure I had complete sentences in a weekly post, and also writing out various responses to a random / things you might not know about topic prompt that's going around. Words, and also possible prompts for a sign-up. Lots of words, scattered about.

[auroracloud]

Thanks for the rec, I'll definitely have to look into that!

Yay for getting fic cleaned up and posted! I should also try posting into more places... I tend to be lazy and just post on AO3 and share on my journal, and then with rarer fandoms/relationships I wonder why hardly anyone's reading it when it's not a part of an exchange. Maybe it'd help if I made more sure that people reach it. ;-) And yay for lots of words otherwise as well!

[talkingtothesky]

Just 200 words for me. *sigh*

[auroracloud]

That's not a bad word count at all, even if it's not what you were hoping for. Good luck finding more productive days as well!

[tinx_r]

Whew. Well, from no writing to writing like my life depended on it. I picked up a fandom5k pinch hit so...
Day 10: 1000 words
Day 11: 1000 words
Today: 1000 words

(are you sensing a theme? Trouble is, it's due tomorrow! Must. Write. Faster!)

Another fandom I have never written in before. A beloved, beloved canon however. (Not of course as beloved as the One True Canon, you understand. But still.) I look forward to talking about it after reveals.

[auroracloud]

Oops, good luck getting yourself to write 2000 words in a day rather than 1000! Sounds very productive even so, though! And yay for new fandoms, especially beloved ones. :-)

[alexcat]

243 for today1 Hopefully I'll get some real writing done on Thursday!

[auroracloud]

Good luck! But 243 is an entirely fine amount of writing, still!

[ysilme]

I'm in a hurry, so just a quick check-in with my tally, 230 words and about an hour of editing for yesterday.
I have Aeon Timeline, got it with a NaNo-discount a couple of years back, but still don't use it because I can't seem to make it work for me, and am overwhelmed with what's available to get into it. I'm also having the older version, but it seems the documentation is only available for the newer one by now.
I totally need something like this myself, so I'm really interested in the answers! For the time being, I'm often using scapple (a mind-mapping software by literatureandlatte, the Scrivener company) as a work-around as I use it for other writing-related things as well.

[auroracloud]

Good work, getting both writing and lots of editing done!

Good to hear about your experiences with Aeon Timeline. Since it's quite pricey for me, I think I'd need more glowing recommendations to be convinced to try it. ;-) I'll have to check out scapple, though, since I've been happy with Scrivener, and I also could use mind-mapping tools for other things as well. Thanks for the input!

[shopfront]

Belated drop by, and this might be something you've considered and discarded because it's generic software instead of something timeline specific but extra features. But would a spreadsheet work? Drop times/dates down the lefthand side, towns/countries/characters/whatever across the top, and just leave blank cells where there's nothing happening. But you could see at a scrolly glance where the gaps are for some things relative to unmoveable historic events, maybe colour fill the lines where the most important events have happened so you can easily pick out whether other things happen before or after them in other columns, and if you're editing your fictional storylines to jigsaw in better with historic dates copy and pasting cells is relatively simple (compared to paper, I'd imagine, anyway)...

I realise not everybody else uses spreadsheets to plan their life like I do though so it may not work for you, heh. But an idea maybe if nothing else is panning out.