Story Time Frames

Story Time Frames is an attempt to track how the stories making up 1632 Universe canon fit together chronologically.

If you want to write a story set in, say, summer of 1634, it is good to know which stories already in canon are also "running" in the summer of 1634.

The spreadsheet is color coded to provide a graphical representation of the story time frames, with a precision (where possible) of one month. The start month is usually shown by bright green shading and the end month by red shading, with yellow shading in-between. If the start is less precise than a particular month, it is shown in a pale green; if the stop is less precise, in rose. If the start and stop periods overlap (e.g., the story starts and stops in summer 34), the overlap months are shown in grey.

The spreadsheet also includes, for each story, the author, title, place of publication and, in most cases, the word count. The last may be helpful for would-be authors wondering what story lengths are most likely to be accepted for publication.

Time frames is based on (in order)

• explicit date slugs in the story
• inferred dates (e.g., if the story is said to begin a month after the death of Quentin Underwood, and we know the date of the latter from a second story, then we can infer when this story began)
• questioning the author (if all else fails, Iver sends an email asking the author to identify the start and stop dates).

Flashbacks are usually ignored.

Because there are so many stories, by so many authors, the Ed Board can't allow authors to be as vague about story starts and stops as in the good old days. You don't have to specify the month, but we prefer to at least specify a particular 12 month period for each.

If time frames conflicts with the listed story, the listed story prevails; tell Iver and he'll fix time frames. Cite the basis for the correction. If time frames is merely more specific as to the time of the start or stop than the story is, then time frames is "protocanonical." The original author can request a change in the listing up until the time some author relies on the info in time frames.

On the "Notes" page of the workbook, Iver has notes explaining how the dates were arrived at for certain stories.

Credits: based initially on the text version created by Virginia DeMarce (draft 7), converted to Excel graphical rep by Iver Cooper with assistance in data conversion from Kerryn Offord and Allen Bryan. Gazette 9 and later by Iver Cooper.