I finished the rough first draft of The Angel of Fire earlier this afternoon and I transferred it to Scrivener. I wrote most of the first draft in a combination of OpenOffice Writer and Microsoft Word. I switched from Scrivener to these more generic word-processors on a whim. I’m still not entirely sure why.

I do know why I am going back to using Scrivener for the edit though. It simply gives more control. You can make changes to a scene and revert them back at the touch of a button. You can mix and match different versions of takes on a scene quite easily. You can mark up the scene titles and notecards in different colours to indicate tension levels and see at a glance the peaks and troughs of the story. (I use a simple red, amber, green system which I will go into at some future date.)

So do I regret leaving Scrivener behind to write the first draft? Nope. The first draft of Angel was pretty much a straight run through the narrative told in the first person in chronological order. I could have written it in crayon on the walls of my padded cell just as easily as in Scrivener. I wrote the manuscript in scenes and marked up each with a level two heading containing the word scene so that when I imported them back into Scrivener it was simple to do a search for the word scene and then split the document at that point using the heading as a title. It took ten minutes tops.

I am going to take the rest of the week off from Warhammer writing now and just let the manuscript sit so I can come back to it with a little distance next week. I am looking forward to it. For me, polishing manuscripts is one of the most fun parts of writing these days. And I am not actually going to stop working. I am off to write a short story and maybe format some ebooks and quite possibly install OSX Lion on my MacBook.

And hey I have just written another blog post. What do you know– two in one day!