nos asks the hive mind: give me your writing org tool tips?

[ultranos]

A couple of friends and I got it into our heads to sorta do NaNoWriMo this year. Except "sorta" in that we're not all writing novels. A bunch of us have assorted writing projects, and this seemed like an excellent way to use the time and cheer each other on as we did it.

My project? To actually write the pre-alpha rev of my newest tabletop setting: fantasy Asian wuxia and elemental mages. I think I've mentioned it before. (I had to start a BibTeX file for bibliographic references, because this thing is forcing me to pull from university libraries. The friend who is helping me acquire those "halped" by sharing some of the more fascinating parts of Tang era Chinese sex practices she'd found in one of the books. My friends, the most halpful.)

Anyway, since I mentioned the BibTeX thing, I'm also trying to figure out the best way of organizing all sorts of random material I scribble down before I commit it to a giant LaTeX document. I've been using a Moleskine and considered a pack of index cards, but the Moleskeine is getting annoying to flip through and annotate for continued pages when I want to append ideas, and my bedroom floor is already a mess and doesn't need index cards added to it for me to trip over.

I think I want something that lets me tack virtual, infinitely long Post-It notes to my computer screen, so I can reorganize them into pretty patterns with string to make the information flow right. (Oh god, the skill web is going to be a nightmare to design without something like this.)

I remember someone once upon a time mentioning Scrivener, and apparently they have a Windows version now. I downloaded a trial, but I was glancing at the tutorial and I'm not sure this is what I want. I'm specifically not writing a novel or a report. On the other hand, I'm writing lots of little parts that I can hopefully collate later, and Scrivener might keep track of it all. I really need to see if it can export into LaTeX and if it understands BibTeX, because that'd be super. Has anyone used this software? How is it? Can I make it do what I want with corkboard webs on the computer?

Is there any other examples of document writing software like this? I don't even know what to call it.

Comments

[synecdochic]

I think you could probably kick Scrivener into doing what you want it to do (although I don't know if it understands LaTeX/BibTeX), but if that doesn't work, you might want to look into mind mapping software?

Also, in our household, "halpful" is denoted by the phrase "helpful like a cat". :)

[ultranos]

Well, I'm willing to try since it does seem like something I could kick into submission. The LaTeX/BibTeX thing would be nice, because then I could also use it for papers and other projects, but I'm also probably good enough at TeX at this point that I could wrestle any text output into the format.

(I was the only person in my department to submit her undergraduate thesis in LaTeX. This caused some...problems, since the LaTeX template provided was subtly different from the .doc template, and the department secretary in charge of accepting theses and I argued over it for hours. The only time in my life I ever yelled at a secretary. I went back the next day and apologized, I felt so bad.)

I thought about mind mapping software. I tried FreeMind (I think?) a few years ago on the suggestion of a previous labmate to help with research organization, and I wasn't thrilled with it. Maybe there are better ones.

Ah yes, cats are extremely halpful. One of my friends' aged cat has a tenancy of sitting on my chest when I'm slouched on the couch trying to work on a laptop. Smoky is not see-through, but he really doesn't care, and you would feel so guilty at attempting to throw him off.

[havocthecat]

Hi, you're here! Where are you mostly on the internet these days, so I can interact with you more?

Anyway, I use Scrivener, but I mostly do novel stuff. But they do collate lots of little parts well, and you can reorganize quite easily with them. So I think you might want to give it another try?

yWriter is a free software, but it has a problem of randomly changing formatting on me and putting double spacing in (I prefer single spacing) or changing all my regular quotes to smart quotes. The creator isn't particulary interested in fixing all of that and so I decided I'd rather pay for software I can control the formatting on. However, yWriter does export to LaTeX. (I don't use it, don't know much about it other than its name, but I do know they've discussed that on the yWriter forums a lot. I probably ought to research what it is.)

Scrivener exports; I have no idea how well they play with LaTeX, though. But I do think that all the oohs and aahs that I heard about Scrivener for years are pretty well deserved. I started putting longer fanfic in it, or even fanfic series, and it's working really well for me that way too.

So tell me more about this project you're working on? Because Asian wuxia and elemental mages sounds like a fascinating game and I would like to hear all about it.

[ultranos]

Actually, I'm still mostly here. Also somewhat on Twitter, and I amuse myself on Tumblr when I'm bored. I've just be stupidly busy lately. I'm trying to get back into posting more here so I can actually interact with people I like. :)

I'm probably going to give Scrivener another shot. I've got the free trial, so I might as well.

Okay, the random formatting changes on yWriter sound like they would drive me crazy.

LaTeX is a document formatting language. It's used a lot in scientific academic fields for papers, journals, and thesis writing. It's got a fairly step learning curve (since you basically type out exactly the formatting you want in a text editor with the text), but I really like it. I also personally think nothing beats it for displaying math in documents, so there's that. (This is the last tabletop system I wrote, formatted in LaTeX)

The project I'm working on is currently named "Salt, Silk, and Steel" (or 3S), and it's basically an Asian-expy fantasy world, because a friend of mine and I got absolutely sick of Western-expy fantasy and, more to the point, attempts at Asian-inspired fantasy that got things wrong enough that it makes her want to stab the people responsible (she's Chinese).

Anyway. The idea is that there are 4 core elements (earth, fire, wind, water), 4 combo elements (lightning, storm, metal, wood), 2 cross elements (life, decay), and Void (which is total hax). Everyone in the world has an affinity to one of these things, and vary in power. So the addition of magic everywhere has done things like kick the tech tree into higher gear, done some interesting things to social structure, etc. There are very specific periods of history I'm looking at for the basis of each of the cultures, with some slack given to account for magic causing butterflies all over the damn place.

The thing that is currently driving me most crazy is how to get a combat system that flows correctly, doesn't take forever to run, has a slightly freeform aspect, and slots in neatly with the rest of the universe so "combat mode" is nearly indistinguishable from "non-combat mode". This is actually annoyingly difficult.

[abyssinia]

*ahem*

NONE OF MY JOURNALS ACCEPT SUBMISSIONS IN LATEX WHAT THE FUCK WHY?

*ahem*

I am now converting all my .docx journal articles into LaTeX for my dissertation because it's so much easier to use the University-provided LaTeX template to conform to all the formatting requirements than trying to wrestle Word into submission. But augh.

[ultranos]

YOUR JOURNALS ARE WEIRD.

And I am so, so sorry about the .docx -> .tex conversion. Well, I'm sorry about anything using .docx, really.

[havocthecat]

Did you end up making things work with Scrivener, or finding another alternative?

So, 3S sounds really fascinating, but the combat system you're trying to come up with sounds like a huge amount of work on the backend. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing! I just wonder how it's going.

[ultranos]

I played around with Scrivener for a bit, but it ended up annoying me too much to continue with it. Part of this is because I have the Windows version, which has less functionality than the Mac one. But I gave up and exported my critical notes to my old standby of gDocs (and pen and paper). I'll end up writing the final thing in LyX anyway. (Or layout in inDesign if I'm super-crazy.)

Oh god, the combat system. Honestly, that's currently my biggest stumbling block, and I'm still not sure how to construct it. Part of my problem is that the easiest way to do it probably involves cards, but the last game I wrote involved cards for the combat system, and I want to do something different. Also, it might end up too tightly constraining things if I make it require cards. This is not supposed to be a board game, after all.

As for how it's going, it's...not. I started working on setting (which is why my bedroom floor currently looks like I'm a Comparative East Asian Studies major in thesis time). Then work dumped a Master's thesis in my lap with the instructions to start turning it into a less-than-ten-page journal paper. That was fun times.