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Writing project

The Salt Almanac

Demonstration content. "The Salt Almanac" is a fictitious writing project, invented only to show how parts, chapters, scenes and sources look in the notebook.

Demonstration premise: a lighthouse keeper's daughter inherits a coastal almanac that seems to predict departures, not weather.

Structure

5,430 words total

Part One — Low Tide

4,010 words

  • Chapter 1 — The Almanac

    2,140 words

    • Scene 1 — Finding the almanac980 words
    • Scene 2 — The first entry1,160 words

  • Chapter 2 — The Ferry

    1,870 words

    • Scene 1 — Waiting at the dock860 words
    • Scene 2 — The bell counted twice1,010 words

Part Two — High Water

1,420 words

  • Chapter 3 — What the Almanac Left Out

    1,420 words

    • Scene 1 — A page torn out1,420 words

Source connection

inspiration

“She counted the ferry bell twice before she believed she was really leaving.”

Used in Chapter 2 — The Ferry. The ferry-bell image from The Glass Orchard sparked this chapter's departure scene.

View the source sample: The Glass Orchard

Revision pass

Continuity pass — the almanac's rules

continuity · active

Make sure the almanac's predictions never contradict an earlier chapter.

4 of 6 notes resolved

Citation tracking

Saved in Chicago author-date.

  • The almanac's keeper reads her inheritance as a duty rather than a curiosity (Eliot 1871).

    Parenthetical citation

    The whole citation sits in brackets after the claim.

  • Woolf (1929) makes the conditions of writing part of the argument, and this chapter borrows that move.

    Narrative citation

    The author's name belongs to the sentence itself.

  • "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately" (Thoreau 1854, chap. 2).

    Quotation with a pinpoint

    Pinpointed by chapter, because chapters are stable across editions in a way page numbers are not.

  • Both novels treat attention as something owed rather than spent (Eliot 1871; Woolf 1929).

    One citation, two sources

    A single citation carries both sources instead of two marks side by side.

Reference list

  • Eliot, George. 1871. Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life. Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons.

    A real book record. Published in parts across 1871 and 1872.

  • Thoreau, Henry David. 1854. Walden; or, Life in the Woods. Boston: Ticknor and Fields.

    A real book record, used here for the quotation above.

  • Woolf, Virginia. 1929. A Room of One's Own. London: Hogarth Press.

    A real book record, used here for its argument rather than any statistic.

Demonstration content. The sentences and the claims they make were written for this sample; the source records are real books. This public page shows pre-rendered text, not live citation records: in your own notebook each citation is a saved record, the reference list is generated from your sources, and changing the style re-renders every citation at once.

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