I am in the midst of writing a book. Beyond this the effort involves the creatio
ID: 661445 • Letter: I
Question
I am in the midst of writing a book. Beyond this the effort involves the creation of a universe in which the story takes place. As you can imagine keeping the workings of a universe, let alone the details of characters, deities, locations, organizations and magic strait in a single brain is a daunting task.
What I am looking for is software that will allow me to:
Create and identify (tag or otherwise differentiate types) entries for all (and more) of the types listed above.
Define/describe relationships, think of a spiderweb chart.
Attach a document or enter a decent 1 - 2 pages of information on each
Manage scenes (so if there is a "scene" artifact type which is just written text I could hypothetically re-order the scenes which would reorder the manuscript.
Keep version/change set information
Explanation / Answer
I would recommend DavidRM's The Journal which I have used for years on many different tasks than just simple online journal.
The Tree structure makes it easy to organize your thoughts and each entry can contain quite a large amount of text if necessary (including any graphics or tables or links).
You can use the ability to change the notes icon to help with workflow. Ideas are given light bulbs, something in progress might have a pencil, something requiring art might have a camera, ect.
You can add a link anywhere in the document, it works like a web link in a way, but links to another place in your document. This makes your spiderweb possible.
You can easily juggle the order of children, to get the order you expect.
I never gave much thought to version control. The software is still in active development, so it might be something to consider asking the developer about if you find it meets all of your other needs. It does support the ability to export the ENTIRE document as a rtf file, so you could use that for version history.
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