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Flexible Fictional Timeline organisation tool
TaoPhoenix:
XKCD did a neat concept sorta on these lines, in that it was a simple line graph where Horozontal was Passing Time and Vertical was Location. Each character had a wavy line as they went places. So you'd plot data points of all the "who's", the "where's", and "Who Needs To Be Where On X Date" then it draws itself. (If you accidentally put a character two places at once you'd discover that you had a messed up line.)
Or you could put a "maximum steepness" so that not counting wizards, a character can't leave North Town at breakfast and be in Southern Glen by Lunch. (It would need to be X days of travel later.)
"Multiple Timelines" are just multi rows of labels on the Horozontal Axis so just line up "Emperor Aasgard's Reign" with "AD 1358" because they are the same "absolute" moment in time.
On the writing side, separate your snips into Time Agnostic, One Condition (Anytime after Wizard Gets Banished), or Two or More Conditions (Has to be between Princess Breaking Her Hand but before Death of King) so the software might be able to help calculate the range of possible points on the graph for the event. Then you fiddle with it (even with an optimizer) until it either all matches or you just have to fix the plot.
kyrathaba:
Good info, Tao. We'll see if worstje responds. The idea of software like this appeals to me on both the programming-side and the idea-side. I used to "Dungeon Master" a lot of AD&D games and roleplaying games using other mechanics systems. For those games, I usually did my own world-building. It appears that worstje may have been wanting this kind of software to assist with fiction writing. I could see myself using it for that, but also for any future world-building I might do.
SphinxCn:
Perhaps one of the software listed on sourceforge might fit
http://sourceforge.net/directory/os:windows/freshness:recently-updated/?q=timeline
kyrathaba:
Nice link, SphinxCn. Thanks! :up:
IainB:
I'm not sure, but you could probably find this in Scrivener (seems to provide a superb authoring/writing toolset), or possibly even Pathagoras.
Failing those, consider setting up your main character as a Facebook person and building their timeline in Facebook. You might lose privacy for your fictional character though... ;)
You could even advertise it, maybe, once the timeline was sufficiently developed.
Who knows? You might get followers who wanted to watch as your character and/or story developed.
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