The Tech Roundup
It’s a big week in tech for me. Asus and Acer have just announced their new ultrabooks, Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) is due any day now and, perhaps, most importantly Literature & Latte have (sort of) announced a release date for Scrivener for Windows. First up, the ultrabooks. I have long lusted after some version of the MacBook Air. It seems to be just about the perfect size for a travelling laptop to me. Somehow I can never quite make myself pull the trigger though. £1000 is a lot of money and to tell the truth I have been less Read more…
Revising Macharius
This is the part I always enjoy. The grunt work of writing the first draft is out of the way and I am now going through The Angel of Fire in Scrivener with an eye to improving it. I took a short break away from the book last week so I could come to it cold for the rewrite. In an ideal world this interval would be longer than a week, but even that small amount of time has given me some distance. Since it’s been several months since I wrote the earliest parts of the book, I have plenty of Read more…
Great Scrivener Tip From David Hewson
David talks about how to quickly mark scenes for revision here. I’ve been using this program for four years now and this has never occurred to me. While I am writing this I may as well mention that I highly recommend David’s book Writing a Novel with Scrivener available from amazon.co.uk and amazon.com. In it David takes you through every step needed for getting a book done in Scrivener, even as far as epublishing it onto the Kindle. Hewson is a former tech journalist and a bestselling detective/thriller writer and he really knows his stuff. The book is a model of clarity Read more…
Green, Amber, Red
On Monday I alluded to the system I use for colour coding scenes in my writing. This works really well in Scrivener because you can set the content labels in the Inspector to use different names and colours and this will be reflected in the outline or the notecards when you use them. You can achieve the same effect by changing the colour of your headers in Word or Writer (or even just putting in a note of the colour) or by writing out a list of your scenes in different coloured inks on a bit of paper. When writing Read more…
Angel of Fire Done, Back to Scrivener
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 Read more…
A Month Without Scrivener
Around one month ago I transferred all my files out Scrivener and started using OpenOffice Writer. This was an experiment and I was not even particularly sure why I was trying it. I said I would keep you all posted as to how it was going. The answer is surprisingly well. There are some things I miss about Scrivener, the little touches like countdowns to deadlines and daily word targets in particular. Making the change has not really affected my productivity any. I managed my usual word counts for the month. Some things are easier now. I can open the Read more…
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