Scrivener

I shouldn’t be writing this post. I should be working on the novel. But Scrivener has given me the chance to do both.

Under the Black Sand is as good as complete. I am going through it, picking up inconsistencies and typos. Nothing major, or so I though. But I did come across a sequence that wasn’t making much sense. It used to, in a much earlier draft, but now that I have added and edited scenes, this was out of place. I selected the scenes, using Cmd-click so that I could leave one scene in place. I then dragged the selection to chapter two, where the scenes make much more sense. This took a few seconds. I know the story and I could see, at a glance, where the selection would fit. Had I been using Word, Pages or any other linear – one block – editor, this would have taken much longer. In fact, I would probably still be copying and pasting. So, Scrivener has allowed me to work on the novel and blog about it.

Every once a while, you come across something that makes your life easier. Switching to a Mac in 2004 was such a moment. Learning video editing on Final Cut Pro was another. Heck, my first car did the same for me. It helped me do things faster and more efficiently.
Discovering Scrievener did that as well. My cluttered and messy ideas made sense. I finished the first draft of a novel. No small feat for someone that has the attention span of a fruit fly. It says something that when I set my system up from scratch recently, Scrivener was one of the first things to be installed. A computer with no Scrivener on it is a crippled computer.

Thanks for creating something special.

 

This post, originally from 23 July 2012, was recreated on 6 January 2016, after my site got deleted as explained here.