Waiting + Scrivening

... and more waiting. Such is the life of a scribbler. Seems like for as long as I can remember, I have been waiting for someone to read something (the usual being editors and agents, but sometimes it's friends, or in the past, creative writing teachers).

While I wait, I try to shift my attention to other things - notably another big project. Whatever I write next (and I'm in very early planning stages), I know one thing: I'll be using Scrivener. This discovered software not only saved my bacon, but organized it, and inspired it. And who doesn't want inspired bacon?

If you have ever worked on a long manuscript, you know what a pain it is to have a dozen windows open on your desktop, a stack of cards, papers, and a binder or two open on your real desk. Not to mention the 300+ pages that you are forever searching and scrolling to find out if the hero wore a blue baseball cap, or a red one.

Well, Scrivener has one of the nicest little interfaces (N.L.I.) that I have ever seen. I took my huge clunky Word doc and chopped it up into chapters, which I could then see as an outline, or cards, or s series of folders. Reference and cut scenes went in a few other folders. I could make notes and cross-references throughout, and Scrivener even generated synopsis for each chapter. Now, these weren't the type of synopsis you could fire off to your agent - but they were excellent for giving an overview of the book in manageable chunks.

I feel like I should add that I am not affiliated with anyone that has created this software - but damn, I should send them a case of wine or something.

For my next novel, I am starting on Scrivener - that combined with a recently watched video of Douglas Glover teaching novel structure, makes me fully armed, pumped and ready to write like my hair is on fire.

In between my waiting that is.