Tedium

I planned a detailed post about what exactly I'm doing and how that fits with the first part of the revisions workshop, but tonight I'm too drained.  Maybe tomorrow. 

In summary: the past few nights have been spent finally (finally!) getting my butt in gear with Liquid Story Binder - henceforward referred to as LSB - and setting everything up for large-scale revisions.

Unfortunately for me and my mental state, "setting up" means hours' worth of importing files, associating files, sorting files into chronological order instead of alphabetical, and tonight: inserting columns (and columns, and columns - 129, to be exact) for scenes into a timeline and labeling them with chapter and scene number.  (Example: third scene in chapter seventeen is labeled "17.3" and so on.)

This is the scut work before the "real" work begins, the stuff that - though tedious - will ultimately make my life easier.  The timeline, for example, will help me visualize and organize issues ranging from character subarcs (i.e. Elspeth's grasp of Gaelic, or appreciation for 17th century food) to sequences of events, times of year, and exact dates, among others.

Of course, were I starting from scratch in LSB (or nearly so, as I will when/if I ever dive into OHW) this kind of thing would grow organically as I wrote, with only small amounts of time required to update my organizational tools.  Starting with 112K of rough draft and umpteen million little picture files, brainstorming notes, etc. and trying to get everything sorted into a software that's completely new to you with sometimes unintuitive commands...well, you see why it's taking so much out of me.

On that note, I'm going to bed.