Maps e.g., etc.

Posted by Amontillado
Jun 17, 2022 at 01:47 PM

Regarding Mont Blanc pens, I’m not in that crowd. Truth to tell, I’ve got a desk set of four TWSBI Vac 700’s in fine, medium, broad, and stub, plus three Opus 88’s for my backpack in fine, medium, and stub. I’ve got a third of a single bespoke pen invested. :-)

I find steel nibs acceptable and mine are all very smooth writers. At least I graduated from Bic pens. Which, actually, will craft the same prose as anything else.

Thanks for the link to Causality. I suspect it’s a great tool, but it’s also planning by “this happened, then this happened.” Necessary in any story, but the planning for me has to focus on meaning.

That’s not to say I don’t appreciate the food for thought.

Aeon Timeline offers timeline and spreadsheet views, which are pretty much time-dictated, and you can also create multiple mind maps either before or after defining times and durations. Also, there is a narrative view. That’s where you can borrow timeline events to stack into chapters, acts, scenes, whatever.

Causality is also not dissimilar to Plottr, although Plottr is bound to a grid without freedom to adjust events within cells.

Regarding my current obsession, Curio, I see how a story could be presented Causality-style.

Curio doesn’t support swimlanes. At least a pale shadow of something similar is possible.

Pinboards in Curio are somewhat like magnetic shapes in Scapple. You can put multiple text blocks (figures, in Curio-speak) in a pinboard like you might add events in a cell in Causality.

Those pinboards can then be moved around.

Where there’s a will there’s a way, and purpose-built tools are very nice. Budget enters the picture at some point, although I try to keep my personal financial leash loose when it comes to software and writing tools.