The Hive’s been buzzing lately with new features! As of today you can now copy characters, settings, and items between stories in Hiveword. Copying saves a ton of time if you are working on a series and need to get the same characters, for example, in each story.
I’d like to point out these are indeed “copies.” Copies are a snapshot of the source data at the time of the copy. Using a character as an example, this means that the original character and the copied character can change independently. In other words, the characters are not linked. I did it this way because a character’s “wants” in Story A could be different than his wants in Story B. This same logic also applies to settings and items.
I know what you’re thinking: “I know what ‘copying’ means, Mike, just tell me how to do it already!” Ok, ok! Sheesh.
Here’s how you do it:
Go to the story you want to copy to.
The characters, settings, and items menus now have a new entry for copying. Here’s the one for characters:
Click on the last entry to copy characters.
You’ll be presented with a page like this:
For each story you have (besides the one you are copying to, obviously) you’ll see the list of characters. In this example, I only have one other story. Simply click the characters you want to copy and click the Copy Characters button. Note that you can quickly select a range of characters by clicking the first character and then shift-clicking the last one. After you click Copy Characters you’ll be taken to the characters list for the story you copied to like in the following screenshot:
You can always go back and copy more characters if you’d like. If you do, there will be a subtle difference from the first time:
Notice that Hiveword knows that you already copied two of the characters and is warning you so that you don’t get unintentional duplicates. If you copy them again you’ll get another character in your story with the same name. If the source character changed in the interim, the new character will reflect that new data while your old copy will not. Remember, copied characters are snapshots in time and not links.
I hope you like this new feature. Let me know what you think in the comments. And stay tuned because a bigger feature is coming within the next week or so!