#schlooper

here are some spreadsheet samples!!

^^^ this is my master calendar. i have a printed copy on the wall of my bedroom that i annotate frequently, and it’s my favorite excuse to get out of my writing chair when i get stuck. this also helps me visualize “dead space” where fics are just...absent. like in 2019, for example. which is, rigth now, totally empty. 

it’s organized by week, with the usual month placements marked out. the blue ribbons mark ongoing things i need to consider when writing - mostly for continuity

^^^ i fondly call this one “kid sheet” because it’s a master of all the kids and what the fuck they’re doing. aimz helped me build this and it’s been a lifesaver because there are SO MANY OF THEM and they do DIFFERENT THINGS

(sometimes i curse myself)

^^^ this is the MASTER master of all the fics. i use different colors and conditional formatting (which is a lifesaver) - the dark purple/pink is for stuff i’ve already posted, blue is for finished and scheduled, green is for WIPs, and baby pink is for not started. all i have to do is add a row and fill out the “status” column and the conditional formatting does the work for me.  the far columns are something i added later, when i realized i needed to keep track of revisions. 

fuck that was a lot i’m so sorry pls let me know if you want any more info on any of these sheets. i have tabs for the idea form and the tag list that auto-update whenever someone fills out the google form :) i also have a fun one where i put all the data so i can look at the pretty graphs!!

ALRIGHT SO NOW THE TIMELINE

the way i started was kind of haphazard. i hadn’t finished the series when i wrote what would become the first installment (day off) so i had to kind of retcon it when it became a big thing. here was my (not so) quick rationale: 

reader (who wasn’t called ‘mom’ generally yet lmao) wouldn’t be much more than 40 for the last kid (that didn’t exist yet - elliot was a creation of the ajf ‘verse along the way) so i wanted to give myself a little wiggle room 

so i decided mom would be born in 1982, because that would put her at about 25 joining the bureau in 2007, which is about the time jj joined, so it was already plausible. in a perfect world, i would have mom from the beginning of the series, but i just couldn’t swing it. 

than i said “okay there are three extra kids. there has to be time for those pregnancies, plausible dating/marriage/misc courtship timeline, also accounting for haleys death.” those were....some variables to figure out and i took pen and paper to it for HOURS

so i worked out the birthdays in 2016 and 2018 for isaac and the girls, figuring hotch started dating beth about two years and change after haley died (so late 2011, early 2012), a long dating period where they could really get married any time, and then a baby. whcih would put day off in about 2020. that was my benchmarker for a while. 

i also had to fuck around with aaron’s age because in canon his birth year is sus (could be 1971, could be 1966. both are on papers somewhere), so i pushed it to 1968 (which is still pushing it to the younger side, frankly, but whatever) and called it a day

the rest of it just kind of came up as i went through it? that’s the nice thing about writing out of order - i can push and shove and wiggle things where i want them most of the time. i also!! stopped doing fics that cover huge swaths of time (for the most part) because i always want to give myself space to add stuff without a full-on revision.