Maps e.g., etc.

Posted by 22111
Jun 18, 2022 at 12:37 PM

Amontillado, I have to admit my only knowledge from Aeon is from its version 1 - which I found so terrible that I never touched it again - it might have become much better in-between, perhaps one-sided, Mac-sided that is, in particular? Also, “import-export” (i.e. both) is important, and Aeon provides this with Scrivener (and perhaps other tools), so my “judgement” isn’t up-to-date.

For presentation purposes (i.e. for export only, from any other tool to timeline), what newer MS Excel versions (at least from 2016) can do, from csv data (which is easy to create, from any human-readable format), is incredibly, but technically demanding (there are several third-party instructions in the web).

Whilst my fountain pens are mostly from Parker, I’d bought the complete Cross sterling silver set then (fountain pen, felt-tip pen, ball-pen, 2 lead pencils (broad and fine line) - all these have been residing in some (not: desk) drawer for more than 20 years, untouched, and I write, when I write, with either a Staedtler 2 HB pencil (which are the original, wooden brown, not the lacquered Faber-Castell green), or a Bic (the regular ones; both the pencils and the Bics, I buy by 20) - back to the roots in a way… - and when I used fountain pens, I had to change the cartridges much too often - I would never ever buy another cartridge fountain pen again, and in my Cross fountain pen, I even have a cartridge which fills by inkpot (I always have the inkpots, too) - so much for nostalgia vs. practical use in my case - but if you’re fine with a fountain pen, that’s perfect: “perfect” in the sense of “optimized”, of having found the tool that “works” best for “you”, i.e. that’s individual; for me, it’s the audio recorder now but many of us obviously have in common that we need some OTHER tool than the screen ONLY, and that seems the core point here.

You say, “but the planning for me has to focus on meaning”.

Strike! And that’s another argument for me to prefer a generic tool like UR, and which allows for several tree (i.e. “enhanced list”) item formats: I’ve got lots of reminders of what I want to achieve, to express, incl. considerations, variants, considerations re variants, and so on: “meta data” of my own, and with specific colors / formats (italics, sometimes bold), I organize all this quite fine, with lots of information in the tree already, i.e. always visible, at least in its broader context (considerations for act II.1 in that “chapter”, those “chapters” or “acts” or whatever being just artificial divisions in order to facilitate navigation within such broader context whilst minimizing scrolling needs), whilst that “meta data” not visually overwhelming your “real data” (intended “output”).

It’s obvious that UR and some others are “ideal” for this way of working, “within your own reminders and guidelines” if I may so so, whilst Ulysses and some others lend themselves much less to this working style; as for “special writers’ software”, each of them follow their specific concept… whilst I desire to implement my own, with the least possible hindrance from the tool designer, and in general, we all should prefer that organizational tool which forces us the least possible amount to adapt to what the tool designer had in mind; thus, I think it’s a bit steep when the Devonthink developers kill one pane out of three:

Since with 3 panes, you can distribute the tree’s “depth” into 2 panes, for much more clarity, and with the “area” and “project” level in pane 1, the specifics of just ONE project then in pane 2; with just 2 panes altogether, you will have to create additional databases in case, in order to just gain a little bit of more clarity, the whole tree being “mixed up” with all the details in a single tree pane… - so they invented hoisting, which would not have been really necessary otherwise, according to me…

As for using MS Word “styles” instead of just jotting down, I’m not that much convinced, since the question of formatting could only arise with regards to (whatever) plays, and then, “Fountain” is the way to go; it’s explained in detail here, https://fountain.io/syntax but if you just remember it’s

INT or EXT = HEADING

SPEAKER
Dialog

Action

And even that is action again

you do in fact 99.5 p.c. of all your formatting with the return, and the shift, keys, i.e. manual corrections after import (it’s the standard import format and can also be used for stage plays) will be minimal, and fiddling-with-form is, whatever McKee here correctly says about the final “draft”, just another form of procrastination, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaP_j9AHdRE - how ever I might mock specific “author’s software”, good books about writing are another thing altogether, and McKee’s “Story”‘s one of the very, very best - and then Vogler and Truby (who’s very greedy though: see his site, and again with terrible software…) and some others - and then there’s a whole library full of material for procrastination again…

There’s this 1997 Patucci album, “One More Angel” (from dire background indeed: poor girl!) - I like to say

“one more angle”

(i.e. one more precise, pertinent angle) instead, and one more, and one more… I just don’t find them from the outset, e.g. from a catalog page, like my beautiful but inept Cross writing set, and thus my erratic way of writing, since even sort of,

Planning comes after subtext, in order to mould it into its ideal form.

wouldn’t be right: it’s not waterfall, neither in the “usual” order, nor the other way round.

It’s a mesh, and subtext and mould have got to mesh, one bearing further developments in its own field, and in the other - and yes, why shouldn’t a serious writer, writing more or less linearily, NOT then throw away 3 times the “publishing” output, if that’s the way they write best?

At the end of the day, the important thing is that they don’t stop midway, for weariness of all the “unnecessary work” on top that would imply, and which, if they go that way, will not have been unnecessary at all, from a quality pov.

Yesterday, I viewed “10 Days Without Mum(my) (“10 jours sans maman”, a piece of crap from France, with a French star of today) - in less than 10 minutes, it was obvious for me that this was to become one more “Sunday evening TV movie” (understood: for the whole family), so I knew:
- it was crap
- it would make money

And correct, 1.2m tickets in France, of which just a fraction (about 12 p.c., normally that’s about 50 p.c., for art house films up to 100 of course) in the Paris region, i.e. people who “know better” hate such fare but it’s “good enough” (according to the producers) that way for the masses in the “provinces”.

From such fare, you could then infer that “good enough” was good enough, while it isn’t.

And that’s all about it, the aforementioned vs. “Cat”; respecting the audience by working harder, which way you ever do it.