The spreadsheet refactoring was worth every minute spent on it. Having a change ripple through 26 tabs without any copy/paste is the way spreadsheets are supposed to work. In my defense, this is the first spreadsheet I’ve ever created with so many tabs referencing each other. I created my first spreadsheet in VisiCalc on an Apple ][e.
I’m facing a similar issue with chapter 27’s subchapters interleaving with The Mage Tower’s chapters. They have not drifted out-of-synch, yet. The entire point of getting all that RPGed was so that I can write the Lit part during my upcoming roadtrip.
But edits will happen.
The “right” way to do this is to have every TMT chapter be its own file and every chapter 27 subchapter be its own file – where the even numbered ones are the same files.
Chapter27-TwoWeeks.odt ceases to exist. The pieces parts will be assembled in YouAskedForIt.odm, with all the other chapter files; this chapter just has more.
TheMageTower.odt, which is currently where everything is, will cease to exist. Despite being a novella, it will become TheMageTower.odm and pull in all the chapter files by reference, including those from chapter 27.
That wasn’t my plan. I was going to manually copy/paste. However, the spreadsheet improvement has me rethinking that “do it quick” might be a long term issue. “Do it right so I don’t need to change it, later,” seems like a better plan.
I like the idea of changing a _planned task_ rather than refactoring existing documents.
Rejected image: Too much tower, not enough Marcy. The facing-away-from-reader thing is a thing. I don’t like it, but it is popular, right now.
BTW: I was up far too late (Fri, Sat, and Sun) writing Marcy’s story. I like magic; dimensional magic is particularly fun. She drew out a grid and polar coordinates on the floor so she could walk around it to help with visualizing the spells and the linear algebra for 2D transformations (she’s only 16). Her instructors were impressed so they built the array of cubes (“we call that sort of thing a ‘jungle gym’.” Is that a translation error? I’d expect a jungle gym to be more organic. “Sigh, humans.”) for the 3D version. I’m SO looking forward to building the 4D version(*), once she gets the ability. This is not going to be a novella. It’s going to be a second book (10K words and I haven’t even left on the roadtrip, yet).
She’s already set off the tower’s dimensional breach alarms by playing with the Light spell.
(*) Two of them. In the first, one of the sides will cut through 4D space to be the side of another cube. It’s a “shortcut” from one cell in the array to another. The training part of it is not building it (that’s beyond Marcy); it’s her learning to sense how it works. In the second, after sensing has been mastered and she’s ready to start moving, the 3D array of cells will become an array of tesseracts, which means the structure itself is 5-dimensional with 4D cells, only one cube of which is in 3D. This will be a Master project for one of the Journeymen at the school. I’m going to need to sketch this out in order to sensibly(?) describe moving through it. How does 4D adjacency work? If a hypercube (1x1x1x1) is next to another, how many sides (cubes) touch? Just one I think. But as you start stacking them, it feels as if the connections would increase. I’m not sure. It’s not something that’s come up in my life, before now.
