This week I've been plotting out not just World War 3.3 but the rest of the series out to 3.8. I got so tired of waiting around for the publishers to get the next edit of The Forever Dead back to me that I just started working on what it would take to do this series properly. I think I can get it done in eight books of about a hundred thousand words each. I've plotted out the overarching narrative and it seems to touch down in 3.8, so I guess we'll see.
I decided to make the process of planning the series about a thousand times harder for myself by getting a new piece of software and trying to learn that by using it to help build out the narrative architecture. It's funny how these things happen. I had some story notes in my Apple Notes app, but I was sitting at my big picture window looking out at my nice view, which meant I was working on my laptop, and the thing about my laptop—for some reason the Apple Notes app on it is cactus. It crashes every second or third time I open it up. It freezes, it hangs; it's bizarre because it works perfectly well on every other device that I have, and I have a lot of Apple devices. On that M2 MacBook Air, however, it is a fail-demon of an app.
I guess I could have stood up and walked across the office and opened up my iMac, or even just reached into my pocket, pulled out my phone, and opened the Notes app on that. But no, I decided Monday morning I would start the working week by searching for an alternative to Apple Notes because it was driving me nucking futs. I thought it’d end up being something dismal but unavoidable like Microsoft OneNote, which I have because I have a subscription to their Office suite. (In fact, I think I've got two subscriptions on two different emails, and I'm paying for them both. I really should do something about that.)
But of course, as soon as I went down the research rabbit hole of what is a good alternative to Apple's built-in Notes app, I found myself seven or eight hours later, 600 videos into a YouTube spiral about rival Notes empires and the German concept of Zettelkasten. I'm not even going to explain it; if you're vaguely interested in it, here's the Wikipedia link.
Mistress Zettelkasten is my master now...
Anyway, long story short, I ended up downloading Obsidian onto all of my devices, and I’ve been learning how to set up a hyperlinked note stack—they call it a vault—that I can import all of my notes about this series… and every other series I've written, if I can be bothered.
The thing I like about it, the reason why I don't think it's a complete waste of my time, is that if I spend about a week doing this, I'll have learned a new piece of software, but I’ll also have created a really powerful hyperlinked Story Bible for the entire Axis of Time (I'm going all the way back to Weapons of Choice and including the Stalin's Hammer trilogy). It's been a bit of a grind, I’ll admit. I have had to learn how to use Markdown, which is something I've always resisted doing before because it looked like baby HTML to me, and I once taught myself HTML and nothing good came of that.
I'd often find myself struggling to remember, when I was building out all of the links and tags in, say, Prince Harry's character note, that I was actually there to plot out his story arc over the next six or seven books, not simply to learn how to use backlinks and hashtags in Obsidian.
I've put about 12 hours into it so far, and I'm finally coming to grips with the software. I’ll confess that AI was an absolute power player in helping me do this. Way better than a FAQ.
I’d already set up a sort of Story Bible with ChatGPT, feeding it copies of all the previous manuscripts* so I could ask questions like, "What type of flowers did Kolhammer's wife plant outside their house on the base in San Diego?" It was usually pretty good at answering, but I’d always have to check every answer, because it might just hallucinate something that sounded very credible.
That was still better than me interrogating my creaky memory of a book I wrote 20 plus years ago, but it wasn’t as efficient and reliable as it could have been. With these Obsidian vaults, however, the Story Bible is completely populated with data that I enter by hand, and it's proving to be a really good way of immersing myself in the early lore and mythology of the series. I'm hoping it’ll be very useful over the next 12 months. I'm also, building out a Story Bible for A Girl in Time so that when I come to finally write the third book in that series, I won't have to spend weeks re-reading the first two books and taking notes on them, because I'll have done it piece by piece and put all of the relevant information—like how does the magic watch work—into this vault.
*Seems a bit wasteful that I had to do this since OpenAI had already stolen them.