In my last post I wrote about the good and bad things that come from knowing how to code. This week I’ve made some headway in getting away from code and back to writing prose.
The good news is that the excellent novelWriter application will soon support the sort of metadata I want to move ahead with the first edit/second draft of my current novel. Based on this and my desire to make novelWriter my main tool for writing, I’ve recently moved my entire manuscript and related notes from Scrivener into a novelWriter project. As I’ve done that I’ve been adding metadata that will let me do a good structural analysis of the story along the lines of the StoryGrid method.
As I’m too impatient to wait for novelWriter to incorporate support for this metadata, I spent the today writing a PHP script that reads a novelWriter project file, then extracts the scene data and exports it, either as a data file suitable for import as a spreadsheet or database, or as a spreadsheet directly (the benefit of exporting to a spreadsheet is being able to improve the way things look in the process). It’s more of a proof of concept than a robust application, but it works, and I think it’s pretty cool. If you’ve been following along and think it might be useful (and you know how to pull code form GitHub and run a PHP script, sorry) you can find the code on GitHub at NovelWriterExtract
Hopefully this is the last post that’s more about programming than writing for some time to come. Now I can get back to working on this story!