Nerdliness On Managing a Timeline

I mentioned earlier this month that I created a spreadsheet to manage the timeline for November 2018’s NaNovel. Most of it was along the lines of “this event happens so-and-so minutes after the previous event” but there were also

• events that had to happen before other events.
• events that had to happen relative to much earlier events.

It also involved a starship accelerating constantly at a multiple of 1g, the acceleration due to gravity, (which is a clue that the Galactic Imperium sneers at our primitive view of the laws of physics). I had to keep track of how far away from Earth the ship was while heading for a hyperjump point in the outer solar system, to take into account lightspeed delays in communication. This post is for those who love spreadsheet hacking; I’ll say a few words about how I did all this.

Mystery Elements in A Novel

The Writing Excuses podcasts have several times talked about Orson Scott Card’s MICE quotient: four different kinds of plot arc. The “I” was originally Idea but the podcasters, particularly Mary Robinette Kowal, now use it for “Inquiry.” An inquiry arc starts with a question; the obstacles and complications in the middle prevent answering the question, and the arc ends with answering it. Two of my recent (very drafty) novels have inquiry arcs – one a significant subplot in an otherwise character- and event-driven story, and one the main arc of a murder mystery on a starship. I wasn’t entirely happy with how the mystery arc progressed in either story, so looked into advice for writing inquiry arcs, primarily from Writing Excuses.

There are two reasons you might want to learn about mystery writing even if you don’t intend to write detective fiction:

Learning Your Character’s Greatest Strength and Weakness

I’m taking a Writing the Other class on “Deep Dive into Diverse Characters,” which asks us to do several short writing exercises each week among other things. We were tasked with reading Stant Litore’s book Write Characters Your Readers Won't Forget, and with following his guidelines to define our character’s greatest strength and greatest weakness. I had no idea how to do this, as with Greatest Desire and Greatest Fear, so as usual I did some research.

Kingdoms and Kinships

In my secondary-world bronze-age fantasy, I wanted a setting significantly different from the standard medieval fantasy world. One particular set of tropes I wanted to avoid was the ones associated with kings, kingdoms, knights, and princesses. But when you eliminate kingdoms, what do you have left that makes sense for an ancient civilization?

Journeymen and crafting

Elsewhere I’ve written about choosing words that reflect the differences between a secondary-world culture and our own. Previously it was about husbands and wives in a matrifocal culture. This time, I want to ruminate about workers: apprentices, journeymen, and masters.

Information Management for Novels

When you’re writing almost anything, you need some way to make the different parts of the thing consistent with each other. You don’t want to keep searching back and forth in your prose; you need “auxiliary information” somewhere, a “bible” that retains ultimate truth, which you can refer to when you’re trying to remember something. We computer geeks refer to this as “external memory” and the process of maintaining it as “information management.” This post talks about the information I need to manage for my secondary-world fantasy (with occasional digressions), how I currently do it, and what I wish I could do instead.

Husbandry

Have you ever wondered what was the connection between “husband” as a noun and “husband” as a verb (and the connection with the phrase “animal husbandry”)?

When you’re trying to create secondary-world cultures, one of the many things you have to do is identify some key elements that are different from your own, and think through the consequence. One consequence is the way people speak, the words they choose, the idioms they use. I’m a word freak, fascinated by word origins and relationships. I’ve learned French, Greek, Latin, and Russian over the years, although they’re pretty much gone from 50 years of neglect. So while creating my early Bronze Age secondary-world fantasy, I started to think about what words and phrases would be different.