Thread:Sakaros/@comment-29301-20180903145046/@comment-29301-20190324042251

No, I've barely thought of the Wiki Awards since I cast the few votes that I did; it was simply something that occurred to me today. Far as Continuity Lockout goes, yeah, that's a phenomenon worth being aware of. Seems to me difficult to avoid if you're writing a long-running series of any kind; nigh-impossible in a niche genre like "fan fiction set during a certain period in the fictional history of a certain decades-old sci-fi franchise".

As to your question, yes. My creative writing projects are only one area of life in which my nature as a compulsive documentarian manifests itself. To give you some idea, in case it could possibly interest you...

I write prose in Word. All the supplementary, "internal documentation" is in Notepad - it takes fewer seconds to open a .txt file. Torchbearer has got its own folder, with subfolders for the first unfinished draft, the second unfinished draft, "Fragments and Miscellaneous" for bits of prose which I wrote out of order and which may or may not make it into the final story, and also an image gallery of relevant stuff from the video games, EU sourcebooks, whatever (when it comes to describing things like space ships and aliens, I find pictures sometimes help to prompt the words I need).

I also have a very long, detailed outline for Torchbearer that's approximately scene-by-scene (but I wrote it last year, and I'm not really using it for this last bout of rewriting), a few smaller semi-outlines for different chunks of the narrative, bearing instructions to myself on what to rewrite them as. There's also a list of each of the characters, cataloging their various skills and talents, combat-related and otherwise, as I'll need to keep track of that for the people who'll last awhile into the series.

For the series as a whole, there's a text file some 23,000 words long, detailing approximately everything I've ever thought of concerning every major character and most of the secondary characters: backstory, personality, plans and ideas for their development over the series, skills/powers/talents, items and equipment.

I used to have an outline for the whole series - well, several, in successive iterations - but every one was very vague after the first two or three installments, and all of said installments were envisioned as novels, the idea of which I have since consigned to Chaos. Spread out among several other text files are lists of concepts to use or consider using - plots or subplots, locations to visit and things the characters might encounter there, relevant world-building and continuity bits. I call this "Outline Spitballing," and some of it's organized, and some not.

In some respects it's rather a mess. A significant portion of these notes date all the way back to early 2016, when I was just starting to jot down the ideas that would eventually lead me to begin what I'm writing now. Accordingly, it's rife with contradictions. To hazard a guess, I think maybe one third of this material needs to be shafted as redundant or outdated, and another third needs to be reorganized and consolidated.

For the series itself, I have general, broad-strokes ideas for where I want the state of the galaxy to go, and the arcs for (most of) the main characters with some detail. A lot is undecided, though, such as how to have all the different plot threads and character arcs sync up chronologically. Right now, though, I'm only concerning myself with writing Torchbearer. There's really no way I'll be able to decide what happens next until that's done.