Forum:Book episode guides

As you may have noticed in the Latest intel page, I have assumed the task of writing several articles for people, places, and things that showed up during the Declassified novels. Since the books are canon (shown by the inclusion of several TV character's actions in their own respective articles), summaries of the events need to be included, much like the show's episode guides.

Before I go into further detail about what I want to have done, let me go through a few (possibly obvious) points so that anyone who hasn't read the books would understand:
 * The books in the novels are divided in 24 chapters, much like the TV show, with each chapter representing one hour of the story.
 * The chapters are about 15-25 pages each, which would take the casual reader about 20 minutes to read (half the length of a TV episode, significantly longer than, say, an episode of The Rookie).
 * Amongst the chapters are time stamps, much like the TV show, that frame the time and location setting of each scene. Each scene marks off about 10 minutes of story time, making each time stamp, therefore, less frequent than the ones on the show.
 * The TV episode guides on this site are about 20KB in size.

With that said, I would like to propose that episode guides for individual chapters of the books be written. I'd rather not have each book's summary restricted to the 3 paragraph passage found in the back of the book, since that format simply echoes what you'd find on Amazon.com; and there's so much more to say than that concerning character and plot development and how the books apply as prequels to the TV series.

So here's how I'd do it. The chapter guide would be written in the same format as an episode guide on this website: sidebar, summary, the guide itself, quotes, dramatis personae, and notes. As for the guide, since my theory holds that a chapter of a novel is about half that of an episode, then a chapter guide would be about 10KB. Additionally, if every action, quote, or breath made by Jack Bauer is mentioned, then you might as well have just read the book, right? Therefore, each individual summarized scene would probably be only half long as each TV scene summarized here: 2 or 3 paragraphs. This would make a chapter guide perhaps 5 or 6 KB in space, but, in my opinion, it would still be large enough to merit its own medium-sized article, as opposed to a 120KB superarticle, if the chapter summary were written all on the same page. I'll write a guide up for one or two chapters by next weekend or so, as a type of experimental sandbox to give you all a visual aid and to provide input.

So that's basically the jist of it. I'd appreciate any feedback regarding this potential project. Thanks. --Deege515 02:12, 10 June 2007 (UTC)