I'm, ahem, trying to get organize before I begin writing my first draft. I've been using an Excel spreadsheet for my scene list when writing my short stories. I'm very pleased with the results. I'm researching various Excel tools for novel and series organization and could really used some advice. I'm writing a fantasy series of 3 books and I write in MS Word. I'm looking to coordinate a series outline and book outline, chapters and scene list. Thank you for any advice!
I used Excel in "The Eagle and the Dragon" mainly to keep track of where my characters were on their very long journey... the length of each leg, how they were traveling (ship/foot/horse/wagon) date they left, date they arrived, so I knew what season it was, weather, etc. I was using a miltary map maker/planner (Falconview) to lay out their route for distance. I am not much of a planner when it comes to writing, so I did this pretty much chapter by chapter, i.e, they are going from Hanoi to Tiantsin, China, leaving in September, going by ship with perhaps five stops of a few day's duration each, when will they get to Tiantsin? Late November, check the weather, probably cold, rainy, foggy. I also had tabs on characters' birthdates, and places of birth
Thanks. I'm going to give the Scrivener demo a try. It's the perfect time to try it out as I set up to begin the first draft of my novel. My current set up is barely adequate for short stores and I want to come up with something better.
One important thing, which may sound weird since I'm recommending Scrivener: Back up, especially if you sync. I had an alarming experience, and briefly lost about a third of my novel, before I successfully scrounged all the missing bits. Check the backup settings; the "last 5 backups" is IMO much too few. And consider occasionally doing a Compile to either PDF or text, just in case. I'm still using Scrivener and plan to keep using it, but as with ANY other software, stuff can occasionally go wrong. I had a false sense of security because the novel was on three devices plus Dropbox, and I was foolishly thinking of that as a form of backup. But of course with syncing, anything that goes wrong goes wrong everywhere; it absolutely was NOT a backup. I'm back to the normal default "do your backups!"
Even if this is beating a dead horse since you already willing to try Scrivener: They're about to release a new version soon (paid update, but if you happen to buy the old version now, it's very likely you'll get the next version for free). Here's a blog entry detailing some of the functions in the upcoming version: https://www.literatureandlatte.com/blog/?p=1061. It seems that this function is very interesting to you (timelines, keeping them straight across various story lines running in parallel).
Thanks! I like to use my setting descriptions to give the readers a sense of travel and passage of time. For my original ' Forgotten Realms ' series I created a time line tracking sun/moon rise, stars and weather. My goal is too make resources like this easier to reference.
This is, of course, recommended for everyone. In particular thinking that a copy kept in the cloud and accessed from multiple devices (not) counts as backup. That said, the desktop version of Scrivener (for sure on the Mac) asks and recommends to set up a backup directory. Your working project copy will be somewhere else, say, on DropBox (which is mirrored to a local folder for offline access), handled like any other document of any other program, but there's a dedicated folder somewhere else where a backup is kept (I don't exactly know how often it will be synced, though). In addition to that, I personally use, on my Mac, Time Machine to an external drive (incremental backup every hour), and clone my primary internal hard drive to another external drive every couple of weeks or so. Yeah, had lost work before... Back on topic: There's another resource called Aeon Timeline. Mac and Windows. As the name says, it's timeline organising. Primarily intended for business use, to keep work on a lengthy project synced. I guess writing (a series of) novel(s) counts as that, too, so it can be used for, and is advertised for that purpose. It syncs with Scrivener (!) and Ulysses (very nice app, but I recommend steering away from it since they switched to an awfully high subscription price lately).
I also have enjoyed scrivener so much for organizing things. If you choose to buy it there are often coupon codes available so look before you pay up. However the other tool I used before to outline was google draw then wrote in google docs. Scrivener is way better though.
