Who else does stuff like this?

[misterangel]

 Trying to organise stories for my Nightmare Season collection, I've written a script which gives a nice visualisation for the stories. The width of the boxes indicates the length of the story, and the height marks the ones that my editor and I think are the most outstanding.

Do other authors do something similar? I feel like I'm missing out on a whole skillset here, not really knowing how to arrange these stories.

Here's the graph: mrangel.info/nightmareseason_stories.html

Comments

[blissmorgan]

Oh wow! One of the things we've discussed from time to time at Circlet is our process for figuring out in what order to place stories in the anthologies, and our reasons therefore. Starting and ending strong and having something shoring up the middle is definitely part of that, but then we also try to factor in things like how many gay stories are in the book, or lesbians, or menage, et cetera, and trying to not have two stories that are too similar in some respect right next to each other.

I am really digging on this visualization that you have worked out; it's something I'd be interested in showing to other folks, if that's okay by you.

[misterangel]

Feel free to share if you like :)

This is actually a modification of the system I made for Inside the Box. A novel doesn't give me such freedom for changing the order, but it gave me a neat way to look at the lengths of different scenes, and adjust how many scenes go into each chapter. I spent quite a while fiddling with the code, trying to get it so the titles of even the short ones would fit in, before I settled on using the mouseover text.

Adapting the same tool to work with a short story collection seemed to make sense, because it lets me see at a glance if there's a bunch of short ones together, or if there's a long interval between the 'big hitter' stories.

I did also build a little utility that would hold a list of keywords for each story, and highlight when rearranging them if I had two that were too similar together. That didn't quite work, because I found it seems odd reading two stories back to back that have the same twist, or the same setting, or the same kind of characters... there's just too many criteria in a book like this, so that worked out not being so useful.