The Ink-Pot and the Palette

Heh. It's just a spreadsheet in Google Drive, with a list of scenes and some blank columns that I fill in by hand, based on my best guesstimate of emotional intensity. Then crop, save as an image, turn it 90 degrees...

I mean, really low tech. :D I did think about coding something that would render the colored bars by valence and intensity based on some numerical value above and below zero, but I felt like that might be carrying obsession and analysis a bit too far!

Still, viewing a novel as a big data set has some merit, as unglamorous and left-brained as that sounds. Early takes on this heat map showed me just where my pacing was off. If an existing graphing tool were out there, I'd definitely find a way to use it!