The Unification Chronicles

Now that I’m done with the first book in Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles and mov­ing on to the sec­ond, I fig­ured now would be a good time to change my sys­tem. I wrote Rev­e­la­tion in Word 2007, kept my word count stats in Excel 2007 and used Ever­note fro my file storage/​sync solu­tion. While this worked, it has some dis­ad­van­tages. Chief among them was los­ing my man­u­script halfway through when a pre­re­lease ver­sion of Ever­note lost the attach­ment. I man­aged to recover my work and had no fur­ther issues with Ever­note after I reverted back to the release ver­sion, but I thought this time around I’d try some­thing else.

Now that I’m not doing NaNoW­riMo any­more, I’m far less con­cerned with over­all word count for the entire book and much more focused on word count for each chap­ter. Instead of shoot­ing for 2,000 words per day, I’m shoot­ing for one chap­ter a day. I noticed that my chap­ters in Rev­e­la­tion tended to run from just under 2,000 words to just under 4,000. This is a side effect of try­ing to keep my chap­ters pod­castable, and at an aver­age read­ing speed of 100 words per minute, that would make the pod­casts between 20 and 40 min­utes, the “sweet spot” for com­muters a lot of pod­cast­ers shoot for. So if I can do a solid chap­ter a day, I should remain on pace for the over­all project.

That said, I decided this time around to write in Google Docs, putting each chap­ter in a sep­a­rate doc­u­ment, all in the same folder. Google Docs has a max­i­mum file size that makes it unsuit­able for hold­ing a whole novel in a sin­gle doc­u­ment — it tops out at about 55,000 words, just enough for NaNoW­riMo, but not beyond — put stor­ing each chap­ter sep­a­rately has a num­ber of advantages.

1. I can eas­ily see my word count for the chapter/​day.
2. I can post just that chap­ter to my blog straight from Google Docs.
3. I can insert/​rearrange chap­ters easily.

I’m still keep­ing my out­line on the UC Wiki, and try­ing to flesh out the amor­phous plot points in each act into defined chap­ters two or three days ahead of actu­ally writ­ing those chap­ters. So the out­line will be con­stantly com­ing into sharper focus as I write. Cur­rently, it’s only really an “out­line” for the first two chap­ters, and beyond that it’s just a dump­ing ground for story ideas and things I want to explore.

I’m keep­ing my word count log in Google Docs as well, and I’ve changed the way it does the math. In Rev­e­la­tion, I had the spread­sheet set up so that all I needed to put in was my total word count, and it cal­cu­lated daily stats from that. For Cru­sade I’m doing this back­wards, enter­ing in my daily counts man­u­ally and hav­ing the spread­sheet total up the word count for the entire novel, as well as my com­bined novel/​blog word count for each day.

Every PC I use, as well as my iPhone, has access to Google Docs, so I can write any­where. I’m not con­cerned about backup, either, as not only does Google Docs autosave far more aggres­sively than Word, it also tracks changes — a fea­ture I never enabled in Word for speed’s sake — to allow me to revert to a pre­vi­ous edit if needed. Yes, I could lose my work if Google Docs itself goes offline, but I con­sider this an accept­able risk.

Any­one else used Google Docs for full-​​length nov­els? How does it work for you?