I am writing a collection of loosely-interrelated short stories, but I'm not writing them in chronological order. I'm a pantser, and I'm using Libre Office on Windows. I'm pretty much looking for a way to tag my stories with which characters are in it, and how they rate internally-chronological to each other without numbering them because I don't know how many digits to use. I realize that I'm going to have to go back and edit stories to accommodate previous changes, but it's not-for-profit and doesn't have deadlines.
I'm not sure what exactly you're asking. In what manner do you wish to tag these stories? Do you mean you want some way to embed a character list in the file's metadata? Or in the file name? You will need to be more specific. Just from my interpretation, it sounds like you are looking for some way to list all the various characters in each story in order to help you preserve continuity/other organisational needs. If so, then perhaps a spread sheet that lists all of the characters in this universe (assuming it all takes place in the same canon) with a column listing which stories they appear in. I have such a spread sheet to keep track of characters too, and I have various fields for things like Factions that accommodate an arbitrary number of tags. What you could do is have a column dedicated to Works and then for each character have a list formatted as such. "Work 1" "Work 2" "Some Other Title" "Yet Another Title" "Work 3: Subtitle" Then you can simply use a filter on the Works column for any entries that contain "Some Other Title", and it will give you a list of only the characters that appear in the story Some Other Title. As for chronological numbering, I don't really see the problem with the number of digits. You could always just use three digits, since it is unlikely you will ever write your 999th story only to curse yourself for not using four digits. But if they share a universe then you could always just list each one using an internal calendar. ie, Story1 might range from 340 - 341, Story2 might range from 332 - 334, etc.
If you're afraid to use numbers because you might need to squeeze a story in between two others now and then, do it like programmers do and number them by tens: 10 First story 20 Next story 30 Story that comes after that ... That way, when you need to write something that happens between the first one and the next, you number if 15 and there's still room to add some more around it. If the relationships between the stories are more complex and you want to play around with them more than just keeping a list, you might consider creating a flowchart. But that's probably overkill.
The flowchart tools should help since I can move stuff around at random and use color-coding. If I used numbering, I might end up with fifteen files between 0200 and 0253. I seriously don't know where I'm going with this collection.
I suddenly came up with an answer that might help, I just don't know how to do it anymore. (Really don't want to track down the dos-based program.) I'm trying to create a database with fields for characters, room for links to different stories, and having the order-code separate from the link. Does anyone have a basic file that could help me get started?
