Suggestion Box

Jedi Moose and I have been bouncing around the logistics on this. We think a character inventory would be cool. We were thinking a collection or book-type item would work, where the individual "entries" or "chapters" are "characters."

This came up because NaNoWriMo is around the corner. Writing.com is perfect for posting completed works and soliciting feedback, but not as much for organizing brainstorms, snippets, and other in-process writing aspects. Jedi uses Scrivener to store his in-process work, and I use Evernote. I tried a database called MasterWriter, which I liked a lot, but it has to be installed on your computer. I want to be able to access the data anywhere, ideally via both web browser and any mobile device, but at a minimum, web-based. Personally, I'd like to keep everything in one place, so it would be fantastic if WDC could incorporate more tools to store and track in-process writing. A character database is one example that we thought we would really use.

Here's the most recent revision of our brainstorm.

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(overall book-like item)
Item Type: Character Inventory
Name: Spec-Fic Characters

(chapter in book-like item)
Item Type: Character Entry
Name: Mr. Smith
Age: 40
Race/Species: xxxxx
Parent 1: xxxxx
Parent 2: xxxxx
Parent ...: xxxxx
Relationship 1: xxxxx
Relationship 2: xxxxx
Relationship ...: xxxxx
Biography: xxxxx
Story 1: xxxxx
Story 2: xxxxx
Story ...: xxxxx

xxxxx = a link to any item in your port or any item inside a book-type item

The linking would allow you to link characters together internally to the Character Inventory if they happen to have a relationship of some sort like a parent. It also lets you link multiple items from your port to the character as well in case you want to tag several stories to a certain character.

You would have to allow for unknown quantities of linkable fields because you don't know if someone is using an alien species that has five genders and who knows how many "parents" a character could have or whether the writer has that character in ten different stories. We thought this might look something like the group members list.

Some fields could be limited like age and height.

I see only one type of "chapter" item inside the Character Inventory and that would be your Character Entry type. I'd leave all those other long items outside the book-type item because you don't know how many or what kind you want to link to. It also allows for the current review system to stay in use for background and story items.

Race/Species I would treat like the static items. Each character only has one of them. But, I would also treat it as a linked item in that a spec-fic person might want to link to a species static item in their port somewhere.

On the topic of linking. I would allow writers to use links to both static items, books and chapters inside books. This way people could organize their project any way they want even if they are using only a single Character Inventory. I'd also create fields for linking photo items. You never know when they want to snag some photos and attach them to the character as inspiration. And you don't know how many they would want to link either.

Regards,
Michelle