so_out_of_ideas (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
so_out_of_ideas) wrote2009-05-08 01:59 pm
so_out_of_ideas) wrote2009-05-08 01:59 pm
Need some advice
Hello, dear flist. I'm in need of a little advice from any of you who are familiar with the use of LJs tagging/memory features. With One Path's end, I've decided to spend the rest of the year focused on two of my original projects. (I'll be writing more about that decision in another post, I think.) One of those projects is Bloodkin; the other is a relatively new concept that I plan as a trilogy.
I've made a closed community for the new one because what I would like to do with it is to post most of my development process there so I can track how the universe evolves. It's mostly for my own information; I've been thinking about the ways in which my stories and characters change from their original conception, and looking back on Bloodkin, it would be really interesting for me as a writer to see how the 'verse went from a place where there was no "magic" per se and the only non-human sentients were vampires and werewolves (mutants) to a place populated with all manner of being, with an underlying magical foundation and a system of magic that pretty much defines the ecology, biology, and what the characters can do, plus shapes how they think and react. I'll never be able to trace that evolution now because a lot of the early rambles have been lost and a lot of the changes actually happened as I got to know the characters and the plot. I started to get confused about which things still worked which didn't. I also use the process of writing out "how stuff works" and "who's who" to solidify and augment my understanding of the characters and their enviroments. So it got really confusing. Eventually, for the sake of my sanity, I went and developed a worldbuilding model that I could use to place the information on the current state of that universe into an organized format so I can find it when I need it.
I'm not very organized by nature, and as each story has different needs and a different focus, I've had to do some experimenting to find methods that work to help me develop and keep track of what I need to know without locking me in when the story changes. The Tarreos novels are going to be my newest experiment. I want to use the community and LJ's built in features as a way of categorizing my various kinds of development work and navigating it quickly. I'll be using tags in some way; I've relied heavily on them to organize my graphics and fanfiction, but I haven't used memories much because it takes longer and by the time I figured out how they worked, I had a huge volume of stuff already posted. I think if I could come up with a memory system to use from the outset, it would work better because I could scroll through a list of memory entries to find the one I wanted. Plus there's now a limit on how many tags one can have.
I've got some ideas for basic categories, like character development or factions' organization, but I'm not sure how to set it up. Like, if I want one memory category called "character development" or if I want "Character: (insert name)" categories so then I could just click that and have a list of entries pertaining to that character. Does anyone have any thoughts about which way would work better?
I've made a closed community for the new one because what I would like to do with it is to post most of my development process there so I can track how the universe evolves. It's mostly for my own information; I've been thinking about the ways in which my stories and characters change from their original conception, and looking back on Bloodkin, it would be really interesting for me as a writer to see how the 'verse went from a place where there was no "magic" per se and the only non-human sentients were vampires and werewolves (mutants) to a place populated with all manner of being, with an underlying magical foundation and a system of magic that pretty much defines the ecology, biology, and what the characters can do, plus shapes how they think and react. I'll never be able to trace that evolution now because a lot of the early rambles have been lost and a lot of the changes actually happened as I got to know the characters and the plot. I started to get confused about which things still worked which didn't. I also use the process of writing out "how stuff works" and "who's who" to solidify and augment my understanding of the characters and their enviroments. So it got really confusing. Eventually, for the sake of my sanity, I went and developed a worldbuilding model that I could use to place the information on the current state of that universe into an organized format so I can find it when I need it.
I'm not very organized by nature, and as each story has different needs and a different focus, I've had to do some experimenting to find methods that work to help me develop and keep track of what I need to know without locking me in when the story changes. The Tarreos novels are going to be my newest experiment. I want to use the community and LJ's built in features as a way of categorizing my various kinds of development work and navigating it quickly. I'll be using tags in some way; I've relied heavily on them to organize my graphics and fanfiction, but I haven't used memories much because it takes longer and by the time I figured out how they worked, I had a huge volume of stuff already posted. I think if I could come up with a memory system to use from the outset, it would work better because I could scroll through a list of memory entries to find the one I wanted. Plus there's now a limit on how many tags one can have.
I've got some ideas for basic categories, like character development or factions' organization, but I'm not sure how to set it up. Like, if I want one memory category called "character development" or if I want "Character: (insert name)" categories so then I could just click that and have a list of entries pertaining to that character. Does anyone have any thoughts about which way would work better?