Feature Creep #1
You ain't sin me, right?
The Feature Creep gets you the advance skinny on Davenport features that are a little further down the road. As such everything you see here is provisional, and may not represent a feature's final, devastating form.
Today's dope: Time Frames
Nothing to do with release dates, mate - it's a bit more literal than that.
A Time Frame is a draggable, resizable overlay that filters what you see through it based on where you are in your novel's timeline. You know those X-Ray machines you have to walk past at the airport? Bit like that, only what it filters is a chunk of time rather than concealed firearms. A Time Frame can live in a drawer, or you can pin it to the screen and take it with you wherever you're working.
Imagine you have a canvas containing a character's story arc, with all the important events and states of mind laid out and tagged against the relevant scenes or dates.
Stretch a Time Frame overlay out over that story arc, and you can scrub back and forth along your novel's timeline to see just the notes relevant at that moment. You can widen the interval to the whole novel, or shrink it to a specific instant.
That's handy enough just as a way to eliminate distractions, but it gets better:
Any notes you create 'through' a Time Frame are automatically tagged with the frame's current view-time, making it easy to work 'in the moment'. And if you think I'm only adding features based on how many puns they let me make, you couldn't be more right.
And it gets even better.
You are writing a fantasy epic, and working in a drawer that has your world map in the background. Drag out a Time Frame, and you can work through it to place markers for your characters or groups, or notable events. Now you can scrub along your timeline and watch the story play out: see your characters move around the map, fight the girl and rescue the dragon.
Oh, and just between you and me, Time Frames are just one use of Perspective Overlays (Perspectives for short). More about those next time...
The Feature Creep gets you the advance skinny on Davenport features that are a little further down the road. As such everything you see here is provisional, and may not represent a feature's final, devastating form.
Today's dope: Time Frames
Nothing to do with release dates, mate - it's a bit more literal than that.
A Time Frame is a draggable, resizable overlay that filters what you see through it based on where you are in your novel's timeline. You know those X-Ray machines you have to walk past at the airport? Bit like that, only what it filters is a chunk of time rather than concealed firearms. A Time Frame can live in a drawer, or you can pin it to the screen and take it with you wherever you're working.
Imagine you have a canvas containing a character's story arc, with all the important events and states of mind laid out and tagged against the relevant scenes or dates.
Stretch a Time Frame overlay out over that story arc, and you can scrub back and forth along your novel's timeline to see just the notes relevant at that moment. You can widen the interval to the whole novel, or shrink it to a specific instant.
That's handy enough just as a way to eliminate distractions, but it gets better:
Any notes you create 'through' a Time Frame are automatically tagged with the frame's current view-time, making it easy to work 'in the moment'. And if you think I'm only adding features based on how many puns they let me make, you couldn't be more right.
And it gets even better.
You are writing a fantasy epic, and working in a drawer that has your world map in the background. Drag out a Time Frame, and you can work through it to place markers for your characters or groups, or notable events. Now you can scrub along your timeline and watch the story play out: see your characters move around the map, fight the girl and rescue the dragon.
Oh, and just between you and me, Time Frames are just one use of Perspective Overlays (Perspectives for short). More about those next time...
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