I'm in LOVE!

Current Theme Song (aka what's playing on my ipod right now): Yellow by Coldplay.


Oh my goodness, Scriveners, where have you been all my life?! Best. Writing. Program. Ever. For those of you who don't know, Scriveners is a Mac-only writing program. Remember when I said that I have wanted a Mac for years? Well, besides being pretty much virus incompatible (boo-ya baby!), I also wanted to try Scriveners. I had heard a lot about it from other writer friends. They touted it like the best thing since pancakes and sliced cheese. And you know what? They were right.

Like most writers, I've been using Word for most of my life, or minor variations of it. But it is business/letter writing program. Meaning it was not designed for the creatively inclined. This is. I did not realize how big of a difference it could make until I downloaded the 30-day free trial.

1. Writing - Unlike Word or other similar programs, Scrivners does not give you a page number, only a word count. Thus, you have one continuous "page" of text so you can focus on writing instead of how many pages you've covered.


2. Editing - because of the single sheet idea, you are instead encouraged to break up your writing into "sections," be that scenes, chapters, etc. This is huge. Because they also have the most ingenious thing called (appropriately) "a corkboard." And just like it's real-life cousin, you can drag and drop scenes around at the drop of a hat. For someone who had rearranged scenes more times than she can remember, this is like Prometheus' fire. Before, I had to scroll/scan/find the scene I needed, highlight the darn sucker (try doing that with a touchpad), copy, scroll to the place it's supposed to be, paste and hope I didn't miss anything. When I tried moving a few sample scenes from my newest novel, I was so giddy (giggling to myself, high-pitched) my family had to come in and see what was wrong with me.


3. The Research Feature - You can keep your movies/pictures/website links in the same application. And you can split the screen so you can see them at the same time. No more opening the image, which is the source of all your inspiration, quickly trying to keep a mental picture in your head, then opening Word to try and type it in before it disappears. Lather, rinse, repeat. Bwahaha! No more evil impracticality of crappy writing programs! This is seriously the coolest thing.


Like I said, I didn't know what I was missing until I saw what I could do. This may not work for everyone, but it fits my weird brain perfectly. I am totally buying this the second the trial version runs out. I knew I was buying, oh, about ten minutes into the program, when I couldn't stop my fits of incessant giggling. And this is so perfect for my new project, because it deals a lot with time (not time travel, just time) and there are snippets from places that I don't know where they will exactly go yet. Scrivener = new BFF. ^_^


(And if you look really closely at the pictures, you can read what I was working on today. Not sure how much that will change, but that is what a first draft looks like. And plus, if I ever get famous, you can say you saw this scene and you were there.) ;)