This better not be "long"

Still feel weak and brain-fogged. Saturday was the first day since I called in sick that I haven't had to take a long nap in the middle of the day. I managed to do laundry today and I'm wiped out. Can't focus on anything, not even fiction (pity, because there's a couple of books I already have bookmarked that I could read for the Pubby points.)

The Paris book is still pre-outline. Where I am is seeing the general shape and feel of it. Gonna be a lot of scenes in the cafe -- probably one cafe in Montmartre.

And I'm going to avoid doing any more research than I need to establish that the plot is going to work. That is something I discovered over the last books. On the London book, by the time I finally got to the stuff about the shelters, I'd lost some of my notes and links and had to go back and re-read everything anyhow.

This time, I hope to research the details I need only when I am actively writing the scene they are in. But there is a risk there, too. I went back through the Kyoto book and I dislike it more and more.

Looks to me like it isn't the big names and big events that are the problem. I explain the Meiji Restoration several times, with examples, and Tokugawa Ieyasu gets enough on him so I am convinced, once again, that it would be stupid to make an appendix for his sake.

No, it is all the other guys and incidents. Tokugawa Yoshimune comes up several times, Tokugawa Yoshinobu once. And it isn't all Crown Prince Naruhito and of course Emperor Meiji; I name-drop all the way out to Emperor Go-Daigo. And there's Minamoto Yoshitsune, and Benkei, and Nasu (a hero of the Gempei War), and...

It almost looks as if at some point I stopped paying attention and trying to keep the clutter down. But yet; I had this sequence in the London book and nobody complained about needing a cast list!

“Paternoster Row was not as lucky. It had been months since I had been in our little cozy shop with all the friends of my lonely girlhood. All gone now, all returned to ashes. The Dickinson and the Dickens, The Republic in the blue and gold binding and Amazing Stories with the color already bleaching on that gaudy Frank R. Paul.

I did cut more than a few references, even in Linnet's diary entries, on my various edit passes. Maybe I should have spent longer editing the Kyoto book but I was just tired of the thing. And worried about my numbers.

***

The Toba book is actually coming along. I've reached that strange point where it exists for me, now. Not just a collection of ideas, but a place and people and stories that I just need to find the best ones to focus on. Even if the biggest chunk of planning I've done so far is to list the starting attributes of the "gods" and even then...I want to do a lot more with different relations to the "gods," ranging all the way from working with them as equals to having never heard of them.

At some point I need to sit down and do some charting to figure out what exactly is going on ca 75,000 years ago.

And I keep thinking about World Anvil or another of those programs. But every one of them, when I've drilled down through all the fluff about how many different kinds of things you can plan, look to me no more useful than a good sheet of graph paper.

If I used world building software, I'd want something that can crosslink the hell out of the data. Something with nesting levels and the ability to see the tree or explore multiple branches for the cross-links between them.

So far, the major thing I've seen that pretty much ALL of these software options offer is the chance to pay a monthly subscription because they are keeping your data hostage -- either in the cloud, or in proprietary formats that can't be read. And tables that might not be proscriptive, per se, but prescriptive can be just as limiting as the urge to fill in the blanks on currency valuation and specie and stamping and issue dates and all can blind you to the need to think about devaluation and currency trading and inflation.

(Or I could have said filling in hair color and eye color and favorite lipstick and you forget to ask how old they are.)

Oh, and Campfire? Yeah, my private name for it -- I still haven't seen a reason to change. It looks fancy, but they have yet to fix even one of the things that really bugged me when I first tried it (you couldn't change the background. Which meant while you were filling in details on your Iron Age civilization, you were looking at a generic late medieval European fantasy village. Really threw me off! And you would think, swapping a background image...oh, right. Proprietary file types, baked data fields...sigh.)