Craig Lambert, author and FLOSS advocate

Doing it all with open-source software

View Your Mind addendum

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In my previous post I suggested using the smiling, frowning, and horrified faces to identify good, bad, and ugly ideas in the mind map.  Another thought is to use them to show pacing at a glance.  A smiling face could indicate that things are going well for the protagonist, a sad face could denote minor trouble or portend bigger trouble, and a horrified face could mark those chapters or scenes in which disaster strikes.  Of course, most of the timeline should be marked with frowning and horrified faces, with a few happy visages to break things up and give the character (and reader) some relief.  A quick mark-up of the early map for Children of the Ice looks like this:

Children_of_the_Ice_vym_pacing

Until I get .svg support working, we’ll have to resort to zooming in:

Children_of_the_Ice_pacing_vym_zoom

But trying to use the smiley, sad, or oh-my-god-it’s-the-end-of-the-world faces to indicate pacing in a time-line of more than an handful of lines quickly turns into a list of faces that are indistinguishable until zoomed in.  I still like being able to see the pacing of the whole tale at a glance, so how else can we do it?  How about color?

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Okay, it shows up better full-size on even a fifteen-inch monitor than it does here.  Here’s a close-up:

Children_of_the_Ice_pacing_color_vym_zoom

An advantage to using colors rather than expressions is the number of levels that can be expressed, although really not many colors can be distinguished against a white background.  Oh for the good old days thirty-five or more years ago of four or sixteen colors against a black background.

Anyway, I think I’ll use the color code for a while (kind of like the terror alert color codes – okay, maybe a bad analog) and see how it works for me.  If you have other ideas, please share.

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