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

Project Suggestions

[elaine bushore fisher (from livejournal.com)]

Word may not have reliable pagination, but electronic forms of the book can be fed into FrameMaker, which has a simple command to mark a word for indexing (also for making a glossary, should you wish to do that also). You can then use the spell-checker to find WWs and index them. Also, the resulting index has hypertext links, so you can easily jump from the index entry to the referenced passage.

This would be in addition to actual readers. You would still need people to manually/optically search for the obsolete and unusual English words, which may not be picked up by spell-checker.

In this instance, the Hard Work would be the initial (manual) pagination. I know this because, once upon a time, this was a project of mine, intended as a surprise to the both of you. Then you asked the FoL to start working on a wiki, and I figured anything I could do would be duplication of that effort.

In any case, I agree with those suggesting Google Docs for the submissions. Rather than trying to keep the records separate, I further suggest you have somebody to compile all of the submissions into the same edition of the book, so you have a single mark-up that includes all of the submissions.