You may have noticed the official calendar for the Tides world on my website.
Did you know it wasn't my first calendar?
The official calendar had me actually putting events into a real calendar and checking time zones to make sure nothing important was being overlapped, and there were no 36-hour days or anything.
The original calendar sketch was a rough estimate on a Google+ Presentation, something to give me a vague idea of what times I was working with. It actually ended up being fairly close to the final calendar. Here's the beta version:
Did you know it wasn't my first calendar?
The official calendar had me actually putting events into a real calendar and checking time zones to make sure nothing important was being overlapped, and there were no 36-hour days or anything.
The original calendar sketch was a rough estimate on a Google+ Presentation, something to give me a vague idea of what times I was working with. It actually ended up being fairly close to the final calendar. Here's the beta version:
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| BETA version. The link has the official calendar! |
Why sketch out a timeline of not just the events in the book, but also Kelly's life?
Because it gave me a better idea of who she was, and what she was dealing with as she grew.
In case you were wondering, Kelly and Trax are Virgos, born September 7. Oh, and they're the rat in the Chinese Zodiac.
I have used timelines in various ways - to flesh out backstory like you mention here, and to make sure I am consistent about past events referred to in the story. Also to make sure parallel threads of events are possible. The trickiest one was a timeline showing times in different time zones so I could be sure that events at a particular time in one part of the world tied in correctly to the times of events elsewhere.
ReplyDeleteTime zone calendars... that ~would~ be tricky!
DeleteIt only makes sense if your timeline spans a matter of days, so hours become important. I used a separate column for each time zone, with each row showing a three-hour block of time. I shaded the cells to show day/night cycles so I could easily tie events together with times of day in different parts of the world.
Delete