It is practically public beta so it might seem unfair to rate it now, but in the current state I don't find Campfire useful to me. At the root of the problem is the problem of being prescriptive without also being proscriptive.
Okay, take the character page as example. It prompts you to fill in a box for first, last, and middle name. That's prescriptive; it is reminding you that you might need to come up with the full name of the character because it may very well come up in the story. This is why this software exists; it is a planning software, an outlining software, that helps you nail down details and get them all in a form where it is easy to look them up again in the middle of writing an action scene.
But. Commander Spock doesn't have a first name. His culture doesn't apparently do those. But he does have a naval rank. So this first, last, middle name format is proscriptive here. My new protagonist has at least three names and they are situational, which is an approach that clashes completely with the "this is the real name, it has surname and family name just like everyone we hang out with."
As I said above, this isn't necessarily a criticism of the software as executed. I know they are working on it and will give more flexibility in later versions. (Top of my list is the mandatory background images for all the work pages are pre-installed. I have to look at either Watercolor Portland or Romantic Sunset and that really throws me off when I'm trying to think about sun-drenched Athens and Classical Greek architecture.)
The real conflict is that between having something that will hold your hand and make sure you dot your t's, that puts things in a format where you can easily find, search, compare across file; and with having the freedom to go outside of those rules.
(In the current version the, well I have to call them compromises, are that you can add additional custom blocks on top of the required blocks. Sort of. They appear in a second screen and the primary screen can't be edited. And as for sorting, all of that is handled by meta tags which are not abstracted from any of the previously mentioned blocks but have to be added by hand.)
For the moment, then, I'll stick with Scrivener. (Out of the things I would really love to see in Scrivener, the ability to add string between the index cards would be a wonderful, wonderful thing. It does do some sharing of meta data and will actually track things like character names across files, but being able to visually track connections between elements...)
I'm doing this because I'm trying to solve a little plotting problem. Well, it looked like a little plotting problem ("who thought it was a good idea to invite her?") but it turned out to be just the corner of a big carpet. In the back of my head, events are being manipulated. Manipulated by people that basically are the Greek Gods as presented in Homer.
But I haven't solved if this is obvious to the protagonist. Or to the reader. Or if it is actually a thing and some book down the line we'll actually meet them. Right now the gods are being deniable. It might just be a string of coincidence.
And that's the problem. If "Guilleo" (this character's place-holder name, and that's another thing that clashes with the name block scheme of Campfire) is talking the people at the gallery reception into letting "Athena Fox" visit the archaeological dig in Germany, is that because he is an honest art dealer and doesn't like looters, or because he's an undercover cop possibly pretending to be a crooked dealer himself, or because he's actually in Venice right now and this is the Goddess Athena herself indulging in her second favorite past-time (impersonating a mortal)?
If he is just what he seems I have a cute little scene in which the two of them are bonding with some language games -- but then who thought inviting her to the dig was a good idea? If he is undercover then I get both that scene and a later scene when he is surprisingly hostile (because he's trying to maintain his cover) and I can use him again at the climax -- but then why did he think it was a good idea to get them to invite her, a civilian? (The goddess's motivations are no problem; she figures tossing an Athena Fox into the henhouse is going to stir up things usefully. She's right.) It could even be that the goddess is working at cross-purposes to the cops, but that still begs the question of...are there actually gods in play, and does anyone notice?
This is even getting into my map, because if "Guilleo" is actually Italian then I have an excuse to stop off there on the way back from Germany, and that means I'm going the Venice-Patras ferry boat. (I am dead set on a ferry boat scene but my experience -- and the first draft in my head -- was based on the particulars of the Pireaus-Heraklion ferry. And I know the final action is on an island off the mainland but another thing I am absolutely going to get into the finale even if it makes no sense is The Olympias.)
So, gods. I'm also on for the deniable...but even this is tricky. I have a spooky little girl showing up early on (to do a short info-dump) and there's going to be hints all over her that she's not what she seems. Hints that my protagonist isn't seeped enough yet in the classics to pick up on; for instance, Spooky might give her a necklace with the head of Medusa on it. And there may be owls later.
I mean, Penny has got to figure this stuff out eventually because that's how her character works. She figures stuff out. And the reader needs to figure it out otherwise why waste the paper on it. But what is it that they are figuring out....and is it actually necessary and functional at some junctions of the plot?
I had hoped that if I could stick all these characters and their relationships in Campfire I might be able to figure it out. But as I said at the top......nope.
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