Inkabout L. Darby Gibbs

Science Fiction & Fantasy author

Students of Jump

Since I cannot have a wall of sticky notes for a visual timeline

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Keeping time under control

Keeping track of a timeline in my novels has been a constant frustration for me.  I have tried numerous approaches which were only partially satisfactory.  I am trying a new one out for my second novel in my Students of Jump series.  Time is important because I have my characters moving through large chunks of time on occasion, and it gets tiresome rolling back pages to see what the date was the last time my character was in that place or determining progression of several events that are occurring at the same time. This can’t be a problem I alone am having.

My dream timeline app will give me a horizontal line on which I can assign dates (and create dates that don’t yet exist) and attach key points to them.  I want to be able to add little bubbles or boxes that connect to those points for summary or notes and be able to close them up as I move along the timeline or open them all up and see how it lays out.  I want to be able to click on them and move them if I wish.  But enough about what I want because that is not what I found.  If you find my holy grail, please let me know.

I need to keep track of time as it relates to growing a clone.  This simply cannot be found in mainstream iPhone apps.  I have this new laptop, and it has software new to me.  Some of their names are familiar, but I have not had any experience with them. 

I looked up the description of OneNote and checked out the video on it.  Okay, worth a try, I thought.  I was willing to accept a vertical row of boxes.  It did not quite supply the series of little boxes I was hoping for. (Though it may yet. I’ll keep looking. BINGO – I can make little text boxes that can be moved about.)   After some playing around, I worked out a system of using the time markers from my book plus a short synopsis of the related event.  It seems to be working.  And I won’t have to search though my desk for that paper I last scribbled a timeline on for book 1.  I was also able to set tabs in the same notebook for character lists, publication info and notes.  So it might prove useful for other reasons.  Not my dream timeline, but it’s workable.

What do you do to keep track of your novel timeline? By the way, my husband will not let me take over a large wall and put sticky notes on it.  That is my other dream timeline, but alas, it cannot exist.

Not just sitting around

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Not just watching the flowers grow.

So I have not been preparing my Tuesday prompts and am not busy teaching, but that doesn’t mean I am just sitting around twiddling my thumbs.  I have been steadily working on two separate projects.  One is getting the second of my Student of Jump books (No-time Like the Present) ready for publication at the end of this month.  I just finished what is my pretend final edit.  The one I convince myself is the last one needed.  But in a week or so it will go through another which will no doubt result in finding so many errors I will be a basket case for a few days, losing all confidence before I do another edit which will do the exact opposite, and I will split the difference and feel fairly confident that I have taken care of all I can.  I have my absolutely wonderful beta reader tackling it right now, which will provide the impetus to make changes and edit again.

The other project is The Handbook of Narrative Frameworks for Novels & Short Stories.  This is a gathering of the narrative mode posts I have been doing since February 2013.  After pulling them together, I edited, added, and am currently creating worksheets that will help make use of the frameworks each one provides for novel and story writing.  All and all I have been busy and since school has let out, intensely content finding myself immersed in my writing, spending time with my family, and taking care of those little jobs that always wait for summer to come.