I am finally tying up Angel of Fire. I've had one of those rewrites where changing one thing led to changing another which led to changing another and on and on. I've simply not had time to keep up to date with the blog over the past couple of weeks. In a pitiful attempt to actually post something this week, here are a few things I can recommend. First up is Rachel Aaron's guide to writing 10,000 words a day. Yes, you read that right, that's how to write 10K a day, not a week, which is what I aim for. I've looked at this and I have to say that it all seems sound and sensible. I have written 10K a day in my time before old age and RSI took their toll and I recognise the good sense in what Rachel is saying. I don't see myself writing 10K a … [Read more...]
Software For Writers
As I have said before I am a sucker for any piece of software that threatens to increase my productivity and I have tried out most of them. However there are some that I have used constantly for years now and I really recommend. Scrivener I’ve doubtless gone on about Scrivener until you're sick of hearing it. So I’ll just say this. It is the best tool for writing novels that I know of. It used to be that Scrivener was only available on OSX. This was my main reason for sticking with the Mac. As of a few days ago, it is available for Windows and even Linux. I can move my work from Mac to PC and back as I feel like it and I am very happy about this. Scrivener is available here. David Hewson has an interesting comparison between the OSX … [Read more...]
Magic Bullets
When it comes to technology, some writers like to believe in the magic bullet -- the operating system, the computer, the piece of software that will make all the difference. If only they can find this wondrous thing, it will transform their productivity. I've spent as much time as anybody else in pursuit of this particular Grail. I’ve probably tried most pieces of software aimed at writers and most of the common operating systems. It's never really made a lot of difference. I have found one piece of software I really like (Scrivener) and one that does make a difference but not perhaps for the reasons I would like (Dragon NaturallySpeaking.) Scrivener makes a lot of stuff easier but it does not make me hugely more productive. I write … [Read more...]
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 than impressed with what I have seen of Lion. Heretical as it sounds to many people I actually prefer both Windows 7 and Ubuntu. I have been living in hope that Intel’s Ultrabook initiative would … [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 distance from them. Now its time to get down to revising. What does this process actually involve? Pretty much what you would expect. I am going through the manuscript and re-reading it and making changes where needed. I will hopefully notice some of the … [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 and full of sensible advice. It's also full of useful screenshots. … [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 a scene I assign it a colour. Green scenes are quiet, peaceful or humorous. Amber scenes are ones in which tension is rising, characters are coming under stress or things are going to the dogs. Red is used for scenes of danger, … [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 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, … [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 file on any machine from Dropbox and get to work right away. I have instituted a versioning system that lets me keep backups of my work as I go along. Basically I use the week number and a … [Read more...]
Scrivener on Linux
I just downloaded the .deb package from the Scrivener forums and installed them on a Linux virtual machine running Ubuntu 10.10. It worked flawlessly. I am looking forward to testing this next week. Below is a screenshot of The Angel of Fire imported from OpenOffice Writer. In case you are wondering why the word Scene appears so often in those Binder headings it's because I put it there to mark scenes in my OpenOffice file before I imported it into Scrivener for Linux. I then performed a search for the word and used the Shift+Control+K hotkey combination to split the file into individual scenes in Scrivener. Yes, I spend my time doing this stuff and it really amuses me. I am a sad, sad man. … [Read more...]
A Week On OpenOffice
So here it is, Friday. I have been working away for a week in OpenOffice Writer and I have had some time to assess the impact. I have written and revised my work quite happily and so far I am not missing Scrivener too much. This surprises me. It really does. I have written my last 5 books in Scrivener and have really enjoyed doing so. My only real conclusion is that modern word-processors are catching up with the Scrivener features I like in exactly the same was other operating systems are catching up with and even surpassing OSX. Yeah-- I know that's a huge claim to make in a throwaway line-- I'll get back to it at a future date. There are some things I miss, the Target word count and the Session word count features but that is about … [Read more...]
Scrivener to Writer
This morning I compiled The Angel of Fire, my work in progress, in Scrivener, saved it as an RTF file and transferred it to OpenOffice with the intention of completing it there. I'm still trying to get to the bottom of what my reasons were since I love Scrivener. I'll try and list them in order – that is the order they come to me – probably not the order of importance. I have become very enthusiastic about Ubuntu recently even as I am becoming less fond of the increasingly control freak attitudes displayed by Apple. I find myself increasingly attracted to the idea of open source software. There are lots of reasons for this and this is not the place to go into them. That will probably be the subject of a blog on another day. I work on a … [Read more...]
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