Hypercompendia

124 writing spaces and 177 links.  Cleaned out all the Notes.  Have gone through all four stories and checked the links–although I have not taken care of all the guard fields yet.  Some writing has to be done (just a couple of the spaces are titled to remind me what I saw and were left blank to fill in) and the writing could be polished up a bit.  Also have to make sure that they all make sense.  And, oh yes, have to remember to delete all the page number references that I left in from the text version just to ensure that I remembered to link those places if I wanted (changed or dropped most of them). 

Ran into just a couple of program quirks.  One was when I created a loop of links then led the last one to a faraway writing space within the same story.  For some reason, the program insisted it was illegal and I had to close the program and should go back to baking brownies or something.  Fixed it by eliminating the link to that writing space, but copying the text into a new writing space and linked just to that to keep it neat.

Another little thing is that the writing spaces keep popping up all over the place and often in varying sizes.  The worst part about this is that the main place they like to pop into is the upper left hand corner, which is where the floating toolbar also likes to sleep.  So I’m constantly moving one or the other out of the way, or resizing writing spaces to a consistent box.  I seem to remember something about this in the manual and I only hope that with my own fiddling I haven’t negated the coded preference.

Since I’ve decided to use the nesting concept of hierarchy, I did notice that even within the four separate stories that in pulling the children from their mother’s womb and displaying them, then the chart and outline view will show them as siblings, or on an equal level.  If I stick them back in, then the chart and outline views look nice, but the map view is rather linear.  Which brings me to the next item.

In working in map view (can’t break the habit) I arranged the writing spaces horizontally, alternating one higher, one lower, just so they’d fit easy under 75% view (where the text is still readable).  Chart and outline views must pick that up as whoever’s highest vertically since when the kids were pulled out on top or bottom of their parent boxes, they were listed first on the charts.  In other words, the chart does not follow the flow.  So that I’ll have to rearrange too.

I’m enjoying the working environment of Storyspace (aside from those little quirks–but that’s mostly me, and they didn’t design the program for me, I’m supposed to learn how to manipulate the program) and I’m learning to do things automatically without thinking about them (or having to look them up) to facilitate the process and to lessen any intrusion of the technical upon the narrative.  I love the technical (that’s why I liked Powerpoint and Movie Maker) but I’d worried that it would inhibit the nature of story; it doesn’t.

Should be finishing up on the links and cleanup tomorrow and Monday and give it a thorough run-through to test out the narrative itself.