#google sheets

Anyone feels like working on their Dragon Age Keep? And wanted Dragon Age The Veilguard to have it's own section too? I got you!👀

I shared this template before, but I just made it for Google Sheets too, & both are now available for free on my Ko-fi! 🫡 Have fun! Google Sheets Template ✦ Notion Template

well, besides the heavily self-explanatory name, it's a way for me to practice having & entertaining ideas. while the purpose is to help me make art, most of my work on it is never really supposed to be completed, or even attempted in the first place. it's meant as practice, an exercise in "how would i do this?" and "what would i do here?" & similar questions.

most prompts don't get past the brainstorm phase, and that's okay. they still sharpen my skills and give me practice, and data to carry forward, so that when the time comes to actualize a project, i will be properly equipped. you have to develop the skills to bang it out, when your big idea comes. this can only occur through starting projects and following your curiosity. that being said: you don't have to use it this way. forge your own path.

(rest under the cut)

As mentioned in this post about writing with executive dysfunction, if one of your reasons to keep procrastinating on starting your book is not being able to afford something like World Anvil or Campfire, I’m here to tell you those programs are a luxury, not a necessity: Enter Google Suite (not sponsored but gosh I wish).

MS Office offers more processing power and more fine-tuning, but Office is expensive and only autosaves to OneDrive, and I have a perfectly healthy grudge against OneDrive for failing to sync and losing 19k words of a WIP that I never got back.

Google’s sync has never failed me, and the Google apps (at least for iPhone) aren’t nearly as buggy and clunky as Microsoft’s. So today I’m outlining the system I used for my upcoming fantasy novel with all the helpful pictures and diagrams. Maybe this won’t work for you, maybe you have something else, and that’s okay! I refuse to pay for what I can get legally for free and sometimes Google’s simplicity is to its benefit.

The biggest downside is that you have to manually input and update your data, but as someone who loves organizing and made all these willingly and for fun, I don’t mind.

So. Let’s start with Google Sheets.

The Character Cheat Sheet:

I organized it this way for several reasons:

I can easily see which characters belong to which factions and how many I have named and have to keep up with for each faction

All names are in alphabetical order so when I have to come up with a new name, I can look at my list and pick a letter or a string of sounds I haven’t used as often (and then ignore it and start 8 names with A).

The strikethrough feature lets me keep track of which characters I kill off (yes, I changed it, so this remains spoiler-free)

It’s an easy place to go instead of scrolling up and down an entire manuscript for names I’ve forgotten, with every named character, however minor their role, all in one spot

Also on this page are spare names I’ll see randomly in other media (commercials, movie end credits, etc) and can add easily from my phone before I forget

Also on this page are my summary, my elevator pitch, and important character beats I could otherwise easily mess up, it helps stay consistent

*I also have on here not pictured an age timeline for all my vampires so I keep track of who’s older than who and how well I’ve staggered their ages relative to important events, but it’s made in Photoshop and too much of a pain to censor and add here

On other tabs, I keep track of location names, deities, made-up vocabulary and definitions, and my chapter word count.

The Word Count Guide:

*3/30 Edit to update this chart to its full glory. Column 3 is a cumulative count. Most of what I write breaks 100k and it's fun watching the word count rise until it boils over.

This is the most frustrating to update manually, especially if you don’t have separate docs for each chapter, but it really helps me stay consistent with chapter lengths and the formula for calculating the average and rising totals is super basic.

Not that all your chapters have to be uniform, but if you care about that, this little chart is a fantastic visualizer.

If you have multiple narrators, and this book does, you can also keep track of how many POVs each narrator has, and how spread out they are. I didn’t do that for this book since it’s not an ensemble team and matters less, but I did for my sci-fi WIP, pictured below.

As I was writing that one, I had “scripted” the chapters before going back and writing out all the glorious narrative, and updated the symbols from “scripted” to “finished” accordingly.

I also have a pie chart that I had to make manually on a convoluted iPhone app to color coordinate specifically the way I wanted to easily tell who narrates the most out of the cast, and who needs more representation.

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Google Docs

Can’t show you much here unfortunately but I’d like to take an aside to talk about my “scene bits” docs.

It’s what it says on the tin, an entire doc all labeled with different heading styles with blurbs for each scene I want to include at some point in the book so I can hop around easily. Whether they make it into the manuscript or not, all practice is good practice and I like to keep old ideas because they might be useful in unsuspecting ways later.

Separate from that, I keep most of my deleted scenes and scene chunks for, again, possible use later in a “deleted scenes” doc, all labeled accordingly.

When I designed my alien language for the sci-fi series, I created a Word doc dictionary and my own "translation" matrix, for easy look-up or word generation whenever I needed it (do y'all want a breakdown for creating foreign languages? It's so fun).

Normally, as with my sci-fi series, I have an entire doc filled with character sheets and important details, I just… didn’t do that for this book. But the point is—you can still make those for free on any word processing software, you don’t need fancy gadgets.

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I hope this helps anyone struggling! It doesn’t have to be fancy. It doesn’t have to be expensive. Everything I made here, minus the aforementioned timeline and pie chart, was done with basic excel skills and the paint bucket tool. I imagine this can be applicable to games, comics, what have you, it knows no bounds!

ok, but what if...

— server exclusive: CELESTIAL THREADS + [ link ]

this template was made possible thanks to my monthly patrons and one-time donors on ko-fi! receive a supporter-exclusive template when you support me there.

a free google sheet writing tracker template that matches our other writing planner template Celestial Bodies. it's packed with a ton of features, including being able to choose writing days, custom word count goal, dynamic word daily word count as well as writing streaks! this template can be reused for any month or year, as the dates for the tracker update based on the chosen month and year. this template also comes with a quick guide / help sheet to help you get started using it.

to access the template, join my discord server (in the link above or in source) and find it under the new releases channel. get the matching Celestial Bodies template, or other docs under the nanowrimo category, on discount using this link!

feel free to edit as you please, but please do not remove the credit, resell, redistribute or claim as yours whether wholesale, in part, or modified.