I did something this weekend I can't believe I haven't done before.
I was writing this weekend. (Yes, I know, I'm as surprised as you are, and no, that wasn't the something I haven't done before!) While writing, I had a question about something a character had done before, and this is when you know this is the first time I've ever written anything this long or involved, I could not remember which chapter I had described what was done. Well, I found the answer to my question after about two hours of rereading past chapters to find the answer. Not a bad thing to do if you asked me, but it was a terrible use of my time allotted for writing.
I got to a stopping place, turned off the computer, and turned on the boob tube. I used about half of it just looking for the answer to my question. After a few minutes in a bad Skin-e-max movie, I had the revelation. An epiphany, if you will.
Why don't I have the chapter's list and a quick blurb about the happenings in that chapter? My epiphany was, why not use some of the other programs that came with the free one I downloaded.
Side rant real quick.
I've been having problems with the OpenOffice I've been using for many chapters. I honestly didn't know if it was my problem or something one of my editors was doing to the filing in transit between us. I thought it wasn't either of us, but I could no longer deal with it. So I did something TeNderLoin had suggested many moons ago. switch to LibreOffice.
It was much of a problem before, and it was just a minor inconvenience. But the last couple of chapters, whenever one of the editors would leave a side comment, a tried and true feature of the program. One I've utilized many a time myself. But now, whenever I came across one of these side comments, the program would crash, and I'd have to reopen the file. I'd get halfway through chapter correction, and my editor wants to emphasize something I liked in writing, and... it crashes again. But in the last chapter, I wasn't even able to get to the page where the comment was before the program hit again.
It was beyond frustrating.
In between chapters and I had not gotten into the next one. So I asked my editors again for their input since it would also affect them. And they both encouraged me to make a move. So I did it. It was a perfect time to do it.
So I did it this weekend. When installing the new program, I noticed the other parts of the suite. While watching fake fornication on Skin-e-max, I remembered one of those extra programs in the new LibreOffice suite, the spreadsheets! (I know, right!) As I was saying, this would lead me to my epiphany.
So I started it on Friday night, and now I have a lovely spreadsheet featuring the chapters, their names, and a little synopsis of what happens in said chapter. I'm also trying to decide if I need to put a character list into the spreadsheet. I do have a separate character list with minor descriptions of them. If I introduce them in a chapter, that is in the new synopsis. I felt so bright for thinking of it, then stupid for not doing it earlier.
I don't feel that stupid about the spreadsheet, but I do when I think about all the time I've spent trying to find out a minor character or action performed in an earlier chapter that I could not remember immediately off hand. So all weekend was spent rereading Mayhem in a Pill and setting up a spreadsheet about said story. I should have had it from the beginning, but I was too busy congratulating myself for keeping up with a minor character tracking sheet and outline of the entire story. Ugh, so much wasted time. I mean, it isn't like I'm wasting all my time writing out long-winded blog entries when I should probably be working on the next chapter. Naw. Nothing like that at all.
Tee hee.
--Shinerdrinker