Unify a Gadgeteer

On Writing: a Sidewinder

With the advent of my new dog-walking timeline, the skill of “choosing what to prioritize” has come to the forefront of my life experience. I do not think I am terrible at this, but neither am I a master. I have too many dreams. Too many big ideas. Too much movie-magical thinking to possibly achieve all the things I’ve told myself I want to do in this lifetime. The result is that I am on a double-down quest to discover the works that really matter to me as an individual Christian soul getting ready for Armageddon as best as I may during this one and only 2023.

What place has fiction in all this madness? I’ve shared some of my thoughts on that elsewhere, and it doesn’t have to be the kind of question one answers with a black and white dogmatism. Art can play a different role in your life than in mine.

But in a life which from childhood onward imagined that I would be a world-renowned fantasy/sci-fi author, the question of whether or not I want to devote my increasingly limited time to writing glorified fan-fiction at such a time as this is not yet out of my mind. Yet I feel compelled toward Earth. The book means something more to me than the story itself. Writing it is a quest of sorts, and I am not the kind of man to put down a quest once I have picked it up.

When a man ought feel free to analyze and amend such subtle philosophies of life is its on rabbit! But what I really need to talk about is the Gadgeteer tool I desire to invent for the sake of completing Earth as a novel.

One of you writes, “By "gadgeteer" do you mean…”

What he wrote next was awesome, and truly useful. But not so much what I meant, which led me to think I might want to better explain myself.

A “gadgeteer” is a file that an author might keep in order to keep track of the world he is creating. It is like a map that extends into a glossary or layered key. The goal is to make it so that when you invent the rigberry bush in chapter 3, you have a way to remember it exists as a potential prop, twist or poetic flourish in chapter 78.

What I personally am after is how to best apply what I’ve learned from smart noting to my own build for Earth, in the hopes of also gleaning some stack/deck structural principals that can be applied to future writing on smart noting. But I also am not opposed to having someone else do this work for me so that I can focus on the writing of Earth alone, relying on the fan-built gadgeteer for Earth’s world-building needs.

All this said, I’m not sure it’s wise to hand off this task to another. Maybe I just needed to write this article in order to clarify what I was after with the idea, and now I’ll move forward more freely. I certainly know that I was hesitant to rush publish more Earth this morning, but I wasn’t anywhere near ready to admit defeat yet. Rather, I think, this is me digging in my heels as I get ready for the swing.