Authors Need Help: Brainstorming Session

[rolanni]

OK, I don’t have much experience coordinating a project this big. My general approach, when confronted with an Enormous Project is to break it down into bite-sized pieces, but! I’m not a project manager and have none of that Foo.

Below, is what I’ve got — comments and advice welcome. I’ll also be looking for volunteers, but that’ll come later.

I’m soliciting ideas on how to implement in order to achieve the goal without loss of life, and without anyone having to bear an enormous burden of work.

The Goal:  A list, for each novel, of all the Liaden-and-other-Weird-Words that appear in that novel, AND a list of Liaden-and-other-Weird-Names that appear in that novel.

What the lists would look like:

1. Title of Book, Edition
a. Word One, Page Number
b. Word Two, Page Number
Lather, rinse, repeat

2. Title of Book, Edition
a. Name One, Page Number
b. Name One, Page Number
Lather, rinse, repeat

I’m guessing that there ought to multiple eyes on each novel, in order to make sure that the maximum number of Weird Words (henceforth WW) are captured. Some of the WW will be English words (we use a smattering of obsolete English words, Just Because), some of the WW will be Terran slang, Delgadan words, and the ever-popular etcetera.

For the names — I’m guessing another buncha eyes for each book, so that the maximum number are captured.

Question: Planet and ship names — Different lists? Or folded into the Names List?

Also needed, someone or someplace to receive, and coordinate, the lists.

Ultimately, the lists will be used by Lee and Miller for Something Really Cool, and will play an important role in the Web Pronunciation Guide Project.

There is some time limitation on getting this together, but at the moment, the deadline is squishy.

So! What’s the best way to set this up?

EDITED TO ADD: Please nobody build anything yet. We're still in brainstorming mode. I appreciate everyone's input.


Originally published at Sharon Lee, Writer. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[adina-atl.livejournal.com]

I used Word on a 23,000 word story with lots of WWs and WNs, removing my existing custom dictionary and creating a new one for that document only. Five minutes of clicking "Add to Dictionary" got me a text file with 123 new words and names in it, including related forms like possessives. Doesn't give page numbers or locations, but does give a word list that could probably be fed into an indexer or even an ebook reader's search function to give the page numbers.

The only thing this doesn't find are names or words that are spelled like standard English words but used for something different, like a person named Cat. The name Jeeves is not flagged by spellcheck, for instance.

There's a free-trial program that will find all the unique words in a document or text file. I haven't downloaded it or tried it yet. You'd wind up wading through a lot of and, or, but, the, a, and said, but it would catch the names that are in the dictionary.

ETA: The free-trial software is Word Patterns by Mysoftwarefactory.net.

[intuition-ist.livejournal.com]

word's spellcheck is pretty functional, true, but its ability to paginate consistently is ... erratic. especially if you open it on different computers with different printer drivers installed.