It has been a long time coming, and the number one hurdle that was in the way of me doing this sooner was the idea of having to scroll back through 2+ years worth of content here on Hive, to grab all of those links.
Lets face it, the "Search" bar on Hive is basically useless. Searching for a person provides you with a random assortment of posts by people who tagged that particular user, and searching for a title of a post - even if you know exactly what it was titled - results in you seeing nothing but random stuff that doesn't even relate to what you were looking for.
What was the option? Well, in hindsight, I could have book marked all of my short stories, that's not a bad one, but I didn't do that.
The only option was to manually scroll. It was time consuming to say the least, and there was more than once where a miss click knocked me from where I was and I had to scroll the entire way once more.
But, it's done.
The End Result
I have 13 full pages on a Google Doc sheet, of just Title, and a link on the line beneath it, line space, title and a link beneath, etc.
Now, I knew I wrote a lot, but god damn.
To put that into perspective. I'm 9 stories in - that's half a page of links - those 9 stories make up 21,173 words. (Word counts mean nothing, but I added it to put it into perspective how much I have to go through)
What I done was compiled the links into one doc, then I followed each link from the first story on, copied the text, and pasted it into a new doc, with some hyperlinks to make it easier to navigate this monster of a document.
I've edited 5 stories, and have another 4 to go until I drop another batch into the document.
It as been so much fun going back to these old short stories and re-reading, editing, and even re-writing vast amounts of them.
It's cool to see that they're really not as bad as I was thinking, but I can see a major improvement in what I'm creating now as opposed to a few years ago. To then use my knowledge and experience now to edit these shorts has also been been fun.
What's Next?
Next on the list after this is to go back and grab links for all of my World Building Posts and do the same thing, although, slightly different.
How I'll do World Building Posts is I'll have headers for each world, then sub header links to sections within each one for sections like, Factions, Noteworthy Characters, Flora and Fauna, Culture, History, ect.
The character section will be really good because I'll be able to take characters from each short story I've written, and link them to particular worlds, and at that, particular regions of the world, and I can have them categorised according to their affiliations, or what side of the law they stand, or what they do, one could run a bar, then that bar can appear in further stories, or a shop, or they're a faction leader, who knows?
But, categories will really help to keep them organised, and it'll allow me to quickly pull from the large pool of people who have already appeared.
Also, there can be information about them, did they die, are they alive, did they move to a different world, and so on.
All in all, it's going to be a major chore, but I'll be able to use this World Bible as a way to remain consistent, and re-use previously thought up ideas.
Why Bother Doing This?
I'm working on something really cool, but I don't want to talk about it or mention it until it's ready. But, lets just say, it's going to be really interesting if it pans out.