Sorry about how late this is, life has been a thing and also I'm just not good at this sort of notifying people of things, thing.
I'm officially notifying y'all that this story is on haitus, though not out of lack of interest. I enjoyed writing this story so far, and when I figure out the tooling, I'll enjoy writing it again. However, for now, I find continuing this story very difficult for a number of reasons. Most critically, up until this point, I've not used any kind of detailed planning or timelining in this story. That's actually fine, except for the fact that I have no structured record of what i've
already done.
This means, e.g., that when I want to check a plot point or a date or time or a character thing, I've been having to, every single time, scan through almost my entire existing story from start to finish. Furthermore, I'm starting to have a LOT of plotlines simultaneously - this is intentional, I want a large number of things to be going on in the background, and I have both long-term and short-term plotlines going on.
The problem is, I actually can't keep track of it, at all. It's all in my head and the text of this story, and it has got to the point of inducing anxiety trying to keep track of all the character details, etc. so I've just been avoiding doing anything around this for ages (which isn't great, really >.< nya). My attention in fanfic has also shifted a bit away from Worm though that kind of goes back and forth and is more due to the kinda burnout-ish thing with this story, and I've been doing more programming as well.
I did start plugging the information into
Manuskript from my existing writing. However, that was excruciatingly dull and takes many many many hours and I couldn't keep my interest - the structure was separate from my existing text, and that made it very difficult if not impossible to e.g. keep track of where I was and what parts of the text were associated with what plots/characters/etc. it took me multiple days just to get the first arc in. Furthermore, I am much more comfortable in the commandline than trying to navigate complex GUIs and plug in complex structure via that sort of interface.
If I'd started writing the story with something like Manuskript it would probably work fine-ish even if I'm much more comfortable in the CLI, actually, but I didn't. And that's not designed for BBCode as well, but that would have been work-around-able.
For tooling, what I need before I can really continue this is:
- Something FOSS - for money reasons, ethics reasons, control-over-files reasons, and not adding unnecessary Cloud crap when I have my own sync/backup thing going on (syncthing all the way ;p)
- Something that can work on existing text files and lets you annotate structure from directly within them
- Ideally, something that integrates with vim/neovim and does not overwhelm you with information panels
If anyone knows anything that is already capable of this then I'd appreciate information on it. However, I did go through a period of trying to find a tool like that and didn't find that much. What I think might be necessary, is for me to write this myself at somepoint.
Coming back to this after a kind message from someone who read this story, it made me think about how I would write that code and how I would structure it. In particular, there exists a protocol called "Language Server Protocol" (LSP) that is designed primarily to give suggestions, hover information, error correction, templates, etc. for when you are working on software. However, there is nothing about the protocol that prevents it from also being used for things like suggesting character names, acting to synchronise and calculate plotline positions, and automatically deriving sequences of events from lists of chapter files with tags added. More generally, it provides a useful framework for integrating large, multifile projects of any kind with any sufficiently pluggable text editor nya.
So, in my future I will probably end up writing an LSP server that can manage this. Unfortunately, I have a lot of other projects and ideas - too many to handle with my current executive function issues though if some people finally hurry up and sort out ADHD medication maybe not in future - so it's on the backburner.
In case you are curious (and in case I never end up getting around to this), my idea goes something like the following:
- Each project is a folder
- The folder has something like content/{**/*.md, **/*.bbcode, ...}, containing all the chapters etc.
- The project also has a configuration of the temporal order of the chapters and perhaps subsections of the chapters
- Chapters can contain annotations that create, modify, destroy, and reference entities - these entities have properties and a path like e.g. plot/<your-plot-here>.stage = (stage-a) => (stage-b)
Thanks for reading, I'm sorry it wasn't a chapter
