Back burners flooding over.

[Addison]

Hi everyone.

Last week I had my kid brother hide the printed version of my work and my father hide my external hard drive. I have not edited or read or done anything to story except let it pay rent on the back burner. ....If this post sounds unlike me I've been watching Big Bang Theory.

Recently I've had an idea of making the story more like a journal. Even with the layout I could make the pages look like there's water rings, finger smudges and stuff. Even making it so the journal entries go to a point, the climax, at which point it switches to third person.

I've smoothed out the realism and characters and plot, now it's just the style and format.
What do you guys think?

 

[psychotick]

Hi,

I'm a little lost with the first part of your post. But the second part while cool, tells me you have some technical issues to overcome to deal with. If you do this, make every page include smudges etc, then each page of your document is no longer a text page - it's an image. This will add a lot to your file size and a lot of formats simply wouldn't be able to handle it. Kindle I don't think will. Because essentially you're printing a picture book. In addition to this, when the text is part of an image it can't simply be edited as text.

Cheers, Greg.

 

[Jackarandajam]

I think it sounds like a good idea, as long as you're planning on paper publishing it, as Psychotick said.
If it was a kindle edition book, the point of rings and smudges would be lost to the digital aspect of the work anyway.

I'm working on a side collection of journal entries; a series of short stories in FPP, based around a traveler in my world. It's fun but dangerous; I have nine partial entries right now, which I suppose is good and bad...
I say go with it, it sounds like it would be a lot of fun to design. Maybe with rough sketches and hand written explanations, crude maps, even an occasional scratched down reminder or doodles in the corners.
I would make sure the written content was complete first, before I started with the fun stuff though. I believe Pages for Mac does that; I know you can import pictures into your writing like a blog entry.
Also, you could print it off however you like, hand-draw and hand-write in the rest, leaving your own thumb prints and coffee stains, scan the pages back onto your computer, then try Blurb.com? They make picture books, and I think you could choose a paper style that fit the idea.