I want to find a platform which will allow me to track all the disparate parts of the book differently. I don't think this exists (it's actually a big part of why I want to write an office suite, but that's a digression for which there isn't time right now). So then I thought that a wiki would be a good place to start. It will track the changes as I make them, which I feel is important as I want to be able to go back to things and see my thought process for a long time in the future.
With that in mind, I will be dividing the creation of the book into discussions of the characters, the timeline, the general things about the book... and then I'll start to write little pieces of the story. The idea is that I can build the novel around those pieces, referencing the original ideas and then modifying them to fit the story itself, etc., while still referencing the basic premise of the element of the story.
When I talk about characters, I'm going to be very detailed. This will enable me to write about them at any point in my personal timeline while keeping them consistent within the timelines of the book. I also want each of them to speak with its own voice. I will have dialect notes for each person and no two will be exactly the same. The narrator will speak differently--better--than anyone else in the story.
The timeline is what it sounds like. Since thigns will unfold at different times within each story, this will allow me to track where I put the "gotcha" story intersection moments while knowing what the fuck is going on as this universe grows and grows.
As I write this I realize that I need to track places as separate items for similar reasons.
General things about the book will be very high level, guiding principles. This will keep me focused on what I actually want to achieve without letting me get too far astray.
I'll also have a separate section about research, because as fantastical as certain elements of this thing will be, I want everything to be grounded in fact or good scientific theory. One story element that's already in my brain requires me to do research on a few, related topics.
In closing, yes, I'm approaching this book as a project with myself as its manager. I think this is a recipe for success, not least because it will save my thoughts (which I haven't been doing at all right now) even if I fall back to the lackadaisical MOster and don't touch it for moths at a time.
I went in search of a wiki that i could keep private . I thought that wikia would be a good place to start. Of course, you can't really get a good look at the functionality until you've signed up. So after jumping through a shitload of hoops I realized that A) I couldn't make it private; and B) I didn't care to take the time to figure out how to delete my account. There's some idiotic mosterdoesalotofthingswithalotofwords.wikia.com out there. I hope someone hits it so Google picks it up.
The next stop is wikispot.com, which is a pretty bare-bones, no fanciness interface. I didn't want a lot of fanciness but this turned out to be less than I'd like. There were a lot of battles with understanding how things work, which starts with my lack of understanding of the base concepts of a wiki. A lot of crappy rendering through poor syntax has led me to a halfway-decent site that I can use to spew from my fingertips the crap which may or may not turn out to be a really good book.
We'll see.
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