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I’ve been really frustrated lately because I can’t find any details from my books in a timely manner. I’d worked on the character sheet, and like that a lot better than the old one, but I’m still losing track of things. Too many files, too much information, too many details in too many places and no easy way to get from here to there.

Over the last week or so, various bits and pieces of the puzzle finally fell into place, and I realized that I make “content management systems” for a living, and what I desperately need is a system to manage my content. Duh!

So, the last couple days have been putting together a web server on my home machines, syncing my desktop with my laptop, loading the CMS software (Drupal) onto it, and now building the organizational structure to support my in easily finding the information I need when I need it.

Like everything, it’s taking 10-times longer than I ever thought it would, but it’s not totally wasted time… right now I have about 8 sites using this CMS, so everything I learn about it applies to all the sites and makes the job from here on out much easier.

So that’s my New Year’s present to myself.

Instead of working yesterday, I spent the day designing a new character sheet.

My problem is that my characters evolve very quickly. I start out with a bunch of walk-on characters and within half a book they’ve evolved into full-blown characters with their own stories. And I’m really sick and tired of having to switch from this character sheet to that one, or having a one-size-fits-all sheet that ends up 90% blank for some characters. And then I have characters across multiple books and I need to keep track of changes they make within each book.

So my challenge was to make one character sheet that would take me from wallpaper character to primary character, without having to redo stuff or have tons of blank pages cluttering up my notebook. At the same time making it accessible, easy to use, and print nicely.

I ended up working it out in Excel, using its outlining feature.

When the outline is collapsed, it is about 1/2 a page long and with the basics of what’s needed for a walk-on character. I could probably collapse it more, but it’s not overwhelming to fill out for a walk-on.

Then as the character grows, there are two more layers of outlining that can be expanded, with the fourth being basically interview questions if you want to know more about your character than you probably know about yourself.

So here it is, if you’re interested: Excel Character Sheet

I don’t think you have to be an Excel expert to use it. Click on the “+” signs on the left hand column to expand a section. At the very top of the column that has the +’s are the numbers 1-4, click on a number to expand the entire level of that outline. You can put all your characters into one Excel file by adding more worksheets. (2002: Insert->Worksheet, 2007: down at the bottom by “Sheet1″ there is a tab to insert new worksheet) To change the name of a worksheet just double-click on “Sheet1″ and type the new name. In 2002, I discovered that if you “copy” worksheets then it truncates the text fields to 256 characters, so just make new worksheet, select contents of original sheet and paste it into the new one. The color-coding was just so I know what level of outline things are on. And if you’re crossing multiple books with a single character, I’d just add another set of rows under each category and label it with book number, so you know how the character evolves with each book.

If it’s useful, you’re welcome to use it. If you have suggestions, comments, changes, let me know.

Addendum: If you’re using Excel 2003 or older, you’re going to run into problems with this file because of some limitations in Excel that they’ve finally fixed in 2007:
1) The total number of characters that can display in a cell: <2003> 1k (when the text is formatted); <2007> 32k or as many as will fit in the cell (regardless of formatting)
2) The number of characters per cell that Excel can print: <2003> 1k; <2007> 32k
3) The number of characters that can be stored and displayed in a cell formatted as Text: <2003> 255; <2007> 32k
I’ve been avoiding learning 2007 up to this point, but I guess if I like my new character sheet, I’m going to have to learn the blasted program.

Addendum 2: Except of course that the maximum row height in 2007 is still 409 whatevers, so still mucking with stuff to get it to do what I want.

One of the things I did on the drive to and from Texas is listen to my mp3 player where I’d stashed a bunch of interviews I’d taken off the EnlightenNext Magazine’s web site. I find it a fascinating magazine, enough so that I’ve sprung for the extra subscription price to access all the interviews on the site.

When I pull interviews off the site to listen to later, I often pull all the interviews of one particular category. And this time I ended up with a whole bunch of interviews on the future of technology and society. Which, as a science fiction writer, left me much food for thought.

One particular fact jumped out at me, and I’ve heard it several times over the course of listening to these interviews, and granted it might be mostly different interviews by the same person, so I’ll continue to take it with a grain of salt.

A quick web search came up with an article written by the same guy who did the interview: Understanding the Accelerating Rate of Change by Ray Kurzweil.

To summarize, he’s saying that the rate of change of technology isn’t a constant… that the rate of change is accelerating. Basically that change happened slower in the past, is happening fast now, and will happen faster in the future.

In the first stage of human-directed technology, it took tens of thousands of years, which is what you would expect for the next stage via the wheel, or stone tools, and that kept accelerating, because when we had stone tools, we could use them to build the next stage. So a thousand years ago a paradigm shift only took a century, like the printing press. And now a paradigm shift, like the World Wide Web, is measured in only a few years’ time.

And… to keep things even more interesting, it’s not a linear acceleration of change, Kurzweil’s research puts forth the theory that it’s and exponential rate of change.

The whole 20th century, because we’ve been speeding up to this point, is equivalent to 20 years of progress at today’s rate of progress…

Okay… so the whole of the change in technology from 1900-2000 is equal to twenty years of change, at today’s rate. Except…

…and we’ll make another 20 years of progress at today’s rate of progress equal to the whole 20th century in the next 14 years, and then we’ll do it again in seven years.

So, just think… people who are 70 or 80 years old are going bug-nuts because the world has changed so much in their lifetime… and Kurzweil’s saying that that same amount of change is going to happen in the next 14 years. And 21 years from now the world world will look twice as different.

If that isn’t bad enough for those of us who are already a little flustered by how fast technology is changing, Kurzweil is saying that the growth is exponentail and that we’re already well into the knee of the curve. So what does that mean for the future?

And because of the explosive power of exponential growth, the 21st century will be equivalent to 20,000 years of progress at today’s rate of progress.

Whoa!! Replay that… “the 21st century will be equivalent to 20,000 years of progress at today’s rate of progress"… 20,000 years?!? Holy Cow!!!

And you know what the really scary part of all that? If you bother to do the least little bit toward taking care of yourself so that you are still alive 25 years from now… chances are real good that technology will have gotten to a place that you’ll live to see the turn of the next century and will have experienced that 20,000 years of change.

On one hand, that thought scares the hell out of me, on the other hand… that’s so cool!!

Done with the edit of chapter 2.

But can’t get into chapter 3. I know some of it is this hormone-crap that’s going on, I could feel the brain-cells solidifying as the day progressed.

But part of it is also that I fought the transition from the last scene to this scene for… I just checked… _4_ months. Last time it took me _four_ months to get this transition to work.

The good news it that the lessons I learned then were well-learned, and I now know how to make scene transitions work. I guess that’s good news.

So, tomorrow I start chapter 3. And, I figure, since I can’t sleep at the moment, I’ll go ahead and do the prep-work, so tomorrow I can get right to doing what needs to be done.

Chapter 1 is done, and two more quick passes at chapter 2 should finish it up. Chapter 3 will not be quite so fast (not that any of this has been fast, but relatively speaking), because most of it is new. But I’m moving and progressing, and feeling really good about the book, for the first time in a very long time.

Life is good.