Writers of all sorts of fiction, from novels to screenplays and even television series, share a single concern; maintaining consistency throughout a given milleau. This is often accomplished by what is called the Show Bible in the television industry. This is the document where all the relevant details from each episode are kept so that they can be looked up when they become important in future episodes. The movie industry has a department devoted to this function. It’s called continuity in that domain. And novelist, especially authors of multivolume series, often have many notebooks filled with lore of the world that they have created.
I have had a programming project on the back burner for some time that amounts to an computerized Show Bible. I may still finish it eventually. I have some ideas for features that I haven’t found in any other product yet. But in the mean time, I think I’ve found a tool that will solve about 80% of the problem. It is the single page web application called TiddlyWiki that I wrote about here a while ago. Here is a brief list of it’s virtues:
- It is small enough to fit on a thumb drive.
- It works with any modern web browser.
- It is easy to create hyperlinks between various entries in the document.
- It is easily searchable.
- It is easy to extend.
- It is easy to format.
- It is easy to add photographs, drawings, video clips, and all kinds of other multimedia to it. In fact, it can display anything that any other web page can.
I have decided that I like the world that Against the Cold of Deepest Space is set in. I intend to develop a Show Bible for it so that I can write multiple stories and perhaps even novels in that world. I am going to use TiddlyWiki to compile that document.
I am, however, going to go ahead and write the short story that I started in the blog post that I labeled (Part 1).
Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the people you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.