I'm in the very early stages of writing a book, and I've decided to play explore Drupal as a tool to help organize my thoughts and keep track of various notes about a variety of characters, themes and action.
I'm not a fan of software (prices ranging from $20 to $300 at http://www.writers-publish.com/book-writing-software.html) that practically claims to write a novel for you, but because I am a writer who tends to jot down a lot of notes on slips of paper whenever inspiration strikes, I do recognize that organization is a department that I could use some help with.
Enter Drupal. Since you're reading this, I assume you know the strengths of this CMS, so I need not say anything about the system in general.
So I installed a new, private Drupal site in a subdirectory of an account I already have, and have begun the background work of research, character development, plot mapping and so on. I'm creating taxonomies of "characters," "themes," "research," "important events," etc., and I expect each of these taxonomies to grow to includes dozens of terms. If inspiration strikes while I'm at the computer, I just key in my notes and make sure to label them with all the relevant taxonomy terms. If it strikes while I'm in the car, half asleep or on the can, I'll transcribe the notes later.
As long as I apply the correct terms to my entries, it ought to really help me when I want to see every note I've jotted down about, for instance, "dead father" or "missing gun" or "evil twin" (and no, those aren't my real taxonomy terms). If you've ever had to thumb though an assortment of notebooks, looseleaf papers and computer files for a piece of info, you'll know just how valuable this is.
If timeline (http://drupal.org/project/timeline) were available for Drupal 6, it would help even more to conceptualize the project ... If a working version were available for Drupal 5, I'd consider using that instead of 6.
As an added bonus, I won't have the fear of losing all my notes should my computer crash or my home burn to the ground. As long as I back up the site, I've peace of mind. And I can upload notes from the hotel while on vacation, if I want.
Just thought I'd share what I believe to be a somewhat unique use of Drupal. If anyone else has tried to use it in this capacity, drop me a line. I'll post updates to this thread to document successes and setbacks I encounter.
Comments
I though I'd add this in
I though I'd add this in case there's any confusion created by the fact that a "book" content type exists.
I'm going to use Drupal to organize my notes and to map the relationship between characters, themes, action, etc. It'll be used to connect lines between the several notes I write, much like how people draw lines between circled words on a whiteboard during brainstroming exercises.
I'm not trying to actually use the "book" content type to write a novel. I'm still trying to decide if "story" or "blog" is a better content type for this project. I'm learning toward "story."
In terms of the basic
In terms of the basic behaviour of the node type there is little difference between "page", "story" and "blog" - they have some slightly different default settings but that's all IIRC. With nodes of type blog you get a couple of extra bells/whistles - the ability to see all blog posts at the URI blog, and the ability to see all of user x's blog posts at blog/x, where x is the uid.
Note that the 5.x.dev version of timeline may actually work well enough for you .. May be worth a quick look.
gpk
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www.alexoria.co.uk
gpk
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www.alexoria.co.uk