I’ve been doing some work on the second edit of the book. As I mentioned before I’m focusing on working out the timeline and I’ve been doing this with the help of some software called Aeon Timeline. I’m taking what I know of the story and the events that happen before, during and after the book, and mapping them out, both in time and places, for not only consistency, but to make sure they make sense. Aeon Timeline works bi-directionally with Scrivener and after spending a bit of time figuring out how it does this (the tutorials aren’t great and I went through a lot of trial and error) I’m now at a place where I’m listing out events in Scrivener, like I would an outline, and then tagging them with a Character, time and a place. Aeon takes this information and maps those out into a timeline for me at which point I can take a look at various things like, oh, what is happening to close together, what needs to line up with a real event. And then Aeon feeds that back into Scrivener, at which point I can rearrange based on order of events and then start working on my second draft.
Neat!
This process, which I thought would be an interesting way of tackling the second draft has actually turned into something crucial and, I think, part of my normal workflow. Being able to see what characters were doing what, when and where has shown me some flaws and it gives me a backbone to work with when editing the second draft. Pretty sure I’ll write a post about this. I’m enjoying this aspect because things I put off like getting into detailed research of places and events is happening now. And so what can be the drudgery of writing down events is broken up by researching those said events, or the areas, and any fine details. And the joy is when you see the events lock together, like a real list of events that happened.
