Over the last week, I've reorganized my entire backup file structure, switched from using LSBXE to Scrivener and converted all documents thusly, downloaded, sorted, transcribed, and backed up all feedback from workshops and class-related stuff, then finally transferred over all my submission history from Sonar3 to Duotrope.
I feel like I can finally get back to, you know, writing. And hopefully submitting. October 26th of last year is apparently the last time I sent out a submission anywhere. Yikes.
If I have free time and I try to watch movies, I have to kick myself and get back to working on book reviews, writing that unfinished novel, submitting, networking, and promoting.
Writing for the most part, is long hours and no pay. Wait, sounds like college...
I've been on a pretty big down slope too. Big part of why I joined up again.
Critiquing always makes me want to write more.
Yeah, it's definitely done that for me. And getting backhanded by a good critique makes me want to fix things up, at least once I get over feeling like a twat for being such a bad bad writer god damn it Mike what's wrong with you?
@Dakota - I do the same. Sit down, start movie/show/game... instant guilt. I can read, but that's about the only thing that doesn't seem like a waste of time.
What's worked for me is sitting down and writing(or trying to anyhow) for two hours as soon as I get home. That, and joining LitReactor has really gotten me writing in a daily basis. I'm proud of myself that so far I'm averaging about 5-6k a week, which is a record for me.
Plus the best thing about that schedule is that after the two hours are done, I no longer feel guilty just messing around the internet or watching television. I think that was the crappiest thing before-getting to the end of the night and feeling that guilt because I wasted all my time watching reruns rather than write.
I just refer to watching movies as "research."
I just refer to watching movies as "research."
- Me too. Instant guilt, instantly gone.
I just refer to watching movies as "research."
- Me too. Instant guilt, instantly gone.
Michael, why the switch from Liquid Story Binder to Scrivener?
What are Liquid Story Binder and Scrivener? I just use a plain word processor. What's the advantage of these other applications?
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
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All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
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All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
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All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Bret a dull boy.
@Pushpaw - They're basically just alternative word processors that have a bunch of optional stuff you may or may not use. LSBXE has just tons of features (dossiers, a music player, comparison reading, image galleries, audio recording, journals, project goals, a mind-mapping widget... it goes on and on), and I can see it being really useful for some. It isn't for me. It was a bit unwieldy and the options were sort of too many, plus it isn't one of those things that fits into a more standard Windows format. Everything just felt slightly off. To be honest, the main reason I got it was because I wanted something portable (I installed it to a thumbdrive) so I could work between laptop and PC, plus at that point I really wanted something where I could customize the environment. I much prefer writing in white text over black, for instance, which I could easily do there. You could also throw up backgrounds for every project, so I had different environments for poetry, short stories, my novel projects, etc. It was nice for a while until I realized I was overcomplicating things. I did like the environments (I'm not one of those people who feels distracted because omg a picture on my desktop or a notification window, I'll never get a word down!) but now I mostly draft out of the house on an iPod Touch using Office² and a bluetooth keyboard, so I was looking for a better way to get finished drafts onto the PC for in-depth revision and editing.
So to answer the other part of your question, Push, and your question, Jason... Scrivener just had more of what I was looking for and less of what I wasn't likely to ever use. I like the ability to store a variety of documents in a single space, for instance, which aren't necessarily part of any actual draft. Notes, research, character bios, whatever. Sometimes I use photographs as a reference for architecture and things of that nature (though not that often). It's nice to be able to just shove all that into Scrivener in a single project but then choose which pieces are actually part of the actual manuscript.
Which is the other nice thing: being able to dump to a variety of filetypes in manuscript format, regardless of what your document looks like. So you can do your editing/writing in 10-point Helvetica or 20-point Comic Sans if you so desire, then dump the whole thing down to a PDF or DOC in order to submit it or workshop it or whatever, but instead of having to do that manually and make a copy (and then do that again if you've made revisions to the original piece), you just have a central place to store the core text (which I believe is stored in RTF) so any changes you make can always go back there and you just click a few buttons to instantly dump the thing to a format ready for submission to a publisher. And since you can store various documents to the same project, you can write up your synopsis/query letter/cover letter etc. and keep it with the manuscript/story you're submitting.
There's a bit of a learning curve with both programs, and they aren't perfect. Both have some issues. Bugs, functions that could work better, etc., but depending on who you are, they may end up being useful (but be careful, they might also just end up distracting you with overabundance of features, or by inadvertently overcomplicating your project). Scrivener stresses that it's for drafting and that you'll want a "real" word processor like Word or the OpenOffice writer to format something, but I've found that the auto-dump to manuscript format is a lovely thing indeed and serves me very well. Too, it helps with revision when you want to move scenes or chapters around, as you can store all these scenes/chapters as their own entities rather than just keeping everything in one giant chronological file.
So your mileage may vary. For me, I think Scriv is pretty much what I wanted: a nicer environment (though less fancy than LSBXE and not at all customizable) that will help me keep things organized and hopefully speed things up when I'm looking to make submissions. I'm going to have virtually no time whatever when school starts, so I need all the help I can get.
Cool-thanks for the rundown.
I'll be working on a dissertation very soon, so I was wondering if something like Scrivener would help me stay organized with my research and drafts.
Scrivener is a fantastic program.
I'm an avid outliner and I plot-map before, during, and after a story, which Scrivener helps me with immensely.
You start out with a "cork board" and can then add documents to it. On top of that, you can also add folders and keep each document in whichever folder -- when you compile it to manuscript format, the folders become chapters and the documents become scenes with the pound sign between them.
My favorite feature is the information pane, which comes with a ton of features inside of it. There's the "note card," where you can either choose to drag-and-drop a picture (for, say, character or setting profiles, which Scrivener has a template for) or write notes on. Then, it has an option to label and tag each document and folder. The defaults are a light red "stamp" across the notecard (which you can view on the corkboard) that says which draft the scene is on and a small color block on the top corner denoting a scene, idea, or chapter. You can customize what these colors mean and the lables say, which was invaluable when I was doing a collab, because I was able to organize my scenes by who was writing what and which draft had been turned in.
Then, in the information pane, you can view keywords -- which you create and tag scenes with -- so that if you wanted to see which scenes dealt with your theme, you can search by keyword. Since you don't typically state your theme outright in the narration, you can't just ctrl+F, but you can tag it with a keyword saying "theme" or, more specifically, "friendship" if you're dealing with friendship.
Then there's document notes, which only show up in the information pane and not in the cork board.
It's so hard to really give someone a run-down of the multitude of features in Scrivener. Word count goals for individual scenes, the project as a whole, and even a counter for your "session" which you can restart whenever. A list of the words you've used by how frequently you've used them. The ability to search for one word and find it in every instance you've used it (great when you're changing a character's name.) The list goes on and on.
I think it runs something like $50, but I torrented it because I am a shameless asshole. I will one day purchase it to show my support for the developers, but not right now. The torrent works perfectly; there are a few minor bugs, but my only real problem was when I didn't have MS Word because it's difficult to get the manuscript to look right in a freeware program. Not impossible, but difficult. I fixed it by torrenting the Microsoft suite. Because torrents fix everything.
Scrivner is a waste for me. I don't really outline. It hasn't turned out well for me in the past. I do a lot more outlining and plotting for screenplays, since the structure needs to be so rigid, but I use CeltX for that. Scrivner's script writing application leaves something to be desired, or did when I tried it out.
CeltX has a novel application, but I can't imagine ever using it. I just use Word to revise and format everything.
The writing thing does seem to soak up a lot of time that isn't actually writing though. I just turned down an offer to edit the journal for criminal forensics professionals in my state. Between the day job, the kid, my masters program, networking, reading, promotion, and somehow finding the time to actually write something, I've run out of hours in the day.
Michael mentions this in the first post; I hope all y'all are backing up your files. This day-n-age it's easy (and free), so do it or the demon-spawn Harddrive Crash will swallow everything you have.
I use Google Docs. I put all my stories up there. They're auto-synced with a Google Drive on my harddrive. So I have them in two different places on my harddrive and then up on a silky smooth cloud. (I have two computers, so I actually have them in two separate physical places, but one fire could destroy both computers, so I got them out of the house.) It's free. You can put up to 5GB free on GDocs, so you can at least back up all your writing. Songs and big-ass pics or videos, you'll have to get more creative with the backup system, or pay some money for a real cloud storage thing.
Here's a good blog post about it: http://warriorpoetblog.com/2012/08/02/save-your-creative-life-in-one-hour-or-less/
I use Dropbox, but I like Google Docs too.
I have a couple hardcopies in a ziploc bag in the icebox. Everything else I just email to myself. I'm not that technosophisticated.
I just find it really easy to draft in MS Word and could never get Scriv to export .doc correctly, when it's pretty much the universal format for a digital manuscript. I might try Scrivener again just for the collection of parafictional documents, or that LSB.
I actually don't plot or outline at all either, Jack. Like I said, I basically just prefer the nicer environment compared to OpenOffice (I don't want to pay for Word) and love the auto-dump to manuscript format. Beyond that... eh. I could take or leave a lot of it. I do plan to experiment with moving scenes around and stuff during revision, but I don't know that it will be something I used a lot. We'll have to see.
After the bugs were patched (or my computer was fixed and it stopped wigging out when I opened torrented programs, I don't really know what the issue was) I never had a problem getting my manuscripts to export correctly. I always go through and clean them up, because I never title my chapters and use a placeholder like "Chapter" and "Scene" for each document, but you should do that anyway so you can double-check that your headers and everything are correct.
I usually do my preliminary drafts in Scrivener, export the manuscript, clean up the headers and chapter titles, and print out a hard copy. From there I go through and hand-edit with a pencil, then key in my changes into a Word document. Print it out again, edit it again, etc. etc.
@Michael I'm telling you, torrents are the way to go. I have no qualms about torrenting something like Word because I could get a free version anyway for being a college student, and this way, I simply have a better version of it. And honestly, I've never been able to get the hang of OpenOffice, nor with converting the document to a more universal file extension.
OpenOffice is really quite functional. It does more or less everything I need it to, I just don't like the slightly less polished feel of it. Word is sexier, Scrivener is sexier. LSBXE is the sexiest, but it also isn't programmed to operate exactly like your average Windows program, so it's got a bit of wonkiness with expected functionality and little things that operate in strange ways (like the cursor not being where it should be by default when you alt+tab between windows, the program coming back into focus if your mouse runs over an open document window, which is irritating when you're doing research on the web or something and accidentally focus the window again this way).
I don't have problems torrenting something I already own (or even music since as a musician, I feel it's always more beneficial to have someone listening to your music, and most people aren't going to buy it unless they know they like it), but generally I try to avoid doing that kind of thing.
Word? OpenOffice? Scrivener? Hell no!
I'm rocking SpeedScript for my Commodore 64 'cause, you know, I'm old school.
Using the trial version of Scrivener. Just did the tutorial to get to know the functionality. I think it's going to be quite useful to help me organize my dissertation. I can keep all the research together in the Scrivener project, and it seems easy to refer to different documents while writing. So I'm thinking it's probably worth the 45 bucks.
Whether I'd find it useful for creative writing or not is another questions. But I'm thinking yes there too, as I've always wanted a way to organize notes on characters and plot etc, beyond emailing things to me that I lose right away.
I think that's definitely one of the things it's built for, so it might well be good for you there.
I keep it bare bones, pen (never a pencil too long to erase, just mark it out) and paper. Everything else just distracts me. I can't afford distractions because even though I am pretty good about sitting down to write daily, some days I get about 3 chapters (15,000 words) other days I literally get 10.
