Yes, it’s true. NovelBase has finally been released!
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Posts Tagged ‘Writing’
NovelBase v1.0 is out!
Sunday, January 17th, 2010Where do you write?
Wednesday, July 29th, 2009Recently came across the http://whereiwrite.org website
This project photographs authors in their office, where they create their works.
Maybe if they used NovelBase their desks would be that little bit tidier 
Event Timeline
Friday, July 17th, 2009In the event timeline section of NovelBase, I wanted the ability to view events as they occur by dates. This mean the horizontal axis shows a chronological timeline, with the dates increasing to the right. The length of the event, i.e the timespan between the start and end date of the event serves as an indicator of the width, and obviously vice versa. The wider the event, the greater the timespan.
On the vertical axis is a list of characters in your book. Each character can have multiple events, and to show this involves some positioning of the events themselves to minimize overlapping. The event timeline as it currently stands is subject to change. I can see some improvements could be made, but that would have to be effectively a rewrite. The current implementation is functional, in that you can see, at a glance, how the event timeline is shaping up.
As the event screen also serves as the scene writing section, this could be named Scenes instead of Events. A scene can actually occur without having the properties of an event, that is the start date and end date can be left blank. This allows the author to create the scene, without having to worry too much about the dates in which it occurs. The downside is that scenes with no dates cannot be displayed in the timeline. Of course, the author can go back and enter the dates after writing the scene and then it will be shown in the timeline.
I wanted to strike a compromise between the immediacy of writing and the usefulness of the timeline, so that if why dates are optional.
Location section added
Thursday, July 16th, 2009I’ve now added a location section in NovelBase. It is very simple at the moment. It uses a friendly name for the location, which is used when it is referred to from other sections of the program. Then the other field is the description in free text for the author to write. This could be expanded in the future but at the moment, it’s short and sweet.
Possible additions could include the ability to import a image to represent the location. I was swaying around on the naming of this section, I initially named it environments, but I feel locations is probably a better word for this. This location section could come more into play in other sections, such as the scene writing screen where the pre-defined location could be selected for that scene.
