Author Chat: Joe Casadonte

How many years have you done NaNoWriMo?

I have never participated. The first time I considered it I was only interested in continuing a story that I was already writing, and the "rules" then made it sound like I had to start a new project. It also seemed a very daunting task; I'm a hideously slow writer. I realized then (and now) that I can do it however I want to and play by whatever rules I want, but at the time I found it much more intimidating than useful, and I've never really looked hard at it again.

I participated in a smaller organized community writing event similar to NaNoWriMo this past January, but with user-defined goals. My goals were to work on the story every day, let someone else read it (at the time only 1 other person had read it) and to work on fixing a particular aspect of the story that was horribly broken should I ever wish to see this published. I'm quite thrilled to say that I accomplished all three goals and then some. This format was much more useful to me, as a bunch of us were able to help one another out by providing very valuable feedback to each other.

How are you using Aeon Timeline for your planning?

I've used it on two main projects so far. The first was to tame a particularly bad sense of time in a story. There were two aspects that needed taming, the history of the characters before the story started and then the story itself. I tackled them separately with two different timelines.

The first was done using a very broad, date-only approach. The characters ages were important to the story so I back-tracked a lot of the details. When did these people meet, how old was this character when a particular event took place, and so on. Aeon Timeline was crucial in helping me with this, as it was easy to tweak something like a birthday by a couple of months and see the results. It also pointed out a couple of problems with the history, and I had to tweak parts of the story a little to accommodate the corrections. There was one, though, that I could not fix, the main character having a doctoral degree and still be the age he was by the time the story takes place. I eventually concluded that he managed to find a six-year undergrad/doctoral program somewhere.

Taming the story itself was a whole other can of worms. Many of the days in the story are told as they unfold, and I found a couple of times that I was cramming too much activity into too small a time period. Aeon Timeline helped me fix that, and it required a lot of shifting around of story pieces. The end result, though, is a much smoother flow of events.

The second project was for a story about two people in their 80's. The story references many aspects of their past life together, so I had to map out that life. Obviously, Aeon Timeline helped out tremendously there. I also had an arc for global, historical events (disasters, wars, inventions, pop culture, etc). This let me see how old they were when they happened, and it greatly informed how their personalities developed. It also filled in some major plot points (as an example, the US's Korean War started just as one of the main characters turned 19, so of course he was drafted, which in turn directly influenced his career choice, which is how he meets the other main character).

How do you connect Aeon Timeline with your other research?

I usually just use the program if I want to look something up, but I have exported the first two timelines as images and added them as external links in Scrivener for quick reference. Same thing with HTML, but I wrote a Perl script to parse the output and strip a lot of it out, so I have just the info I need.