No, it’s not that old-timey game a game in which players try to flip plastic disks into a cup by pressing them on the side sharply with a larger disk. That’s tiddlywinks!

I talked a little about this yesterday, but I’ve had such fun with it, I thought it needed shared again and I should give y’all some more information.

I found this little gem last summer or fall sometime on the forums at Romance Divas. I copied the file and messed with it a little, but didn’t truly grok it’s Flantastic uses at the time. It’s sat on my hard drive, waiting for me to rediscover it when I went searching for a way to build an easily searchable database of my characters for my little Regency world.

So, what IS it already?

TiddlyWiki is a reusable non-linear personal web notebook. That is to say, it is a self-contained webpage that you can add information and track tangled spaghetti-like piles of interrelated information easily. If you add in names like MarciaDrummond it’ll automatically link any references in any of the other entries to the one with that title. You can also specially designate names using [[Marcia Drummond]] instead if you want it to read more plainly (It automagically bolds and connects the links once there’s an entry for that keyword in existence. It probably does a whole heckuvalot more, but I’m happy with what I’ve discovered so far.

Between yesterday and today, I added around 50 entries. Many of them don’t have much information (yet!), but in skimming through the 67k words in my two WIP files, I found some relationships and other tidbits I’d forgotten because I’d entrusted them to my brain or lost the original sticky note. Now, I often compare my mind to a sieve or a colander. DH frequently gives me a hard time because I completely forget scenes in movies or books — Poof! Gone. — unlike him. Ask him about that book he read back when he was 12, I doubledog dare ya! Many a night we’ve stayed up way past our bedtimes while he’s given me the whole plot and possibly one or two others that were somehow related, but maybe just tangentially. =)

I, however, need something to act as my surrogate brain that’s easy to reference and I can quickly follow links when I can only think of part of the incident/person/whatever. I need to be careful, I think I have at least 3 or 4 surrogate brains floating around out there now.

Rediscovering that LB (Lord Barrington, our hero, for those of you tuning in late) has an old dragon of a grandmother makes him MUCH more interesting again.

I promise, Jodi, I won’t lose myself in this (well, not for too long)! I’ve got lots of weaving to do this month.