Oh, you were up and available for me to download. Damn. Ok, where was I two years ago? I was writing the first pages of the first draft of My So-Called Wormhole, oblivious that anything besides Pages (death to MSWord), a notebook, and the internet would be useful to the writing process.
Allow me to digress.
Happy second birthday, novel! (where does the time go?) You’re still just a baby, not ready to be published yet, but you’ve grown a lot over that time (I hope) and maybe you’ll be publishable once you meet a few more people and learn to stop blathering on about how great Buffy the Vampire Slayer is. I’m not asking you to stop completely. Just keep it to a minimum.
That’s what a lot of my time has been devoted to lately--keeping things to a minimum. Condensing passages and finding a better way to say things. That’s supposed to be a step near the end of the process, but you really never know with me.
And seeing as how I’m on full revision #4 (we’ll call it that for the sake of ease), I’m reflecting on how useful Scrivener could have been 2 years ago.
The reason it would have been so useful? It keeps everything organized and in ONE PLACE.
You know how many documents devoted to my novel I have sitting on my desktop? Eleven. Even that was higher than I thought it was going to be, because that’s just my desktop. Those are the high priority documents. There’s also a folder titled “novel” that contains 42 separate items in it, one of which is a folder titled “Thesis” that contains ANOTHER 22 items created for a different incarnation of the novel, half the pages and 4 drafts ago, submitted for graduate school. All having something to do with this novel. Granted, a few are pictures, and one is a spreadsheet of the agents I started sending to before I realized it (and I) was in no way ready for that step. But many of them are different drafts, different ideas, or different crap I’ve taken out thinking I might use that again...Someday?...no.
Buried in those documents are ideas I forgot I’d even thought of. A Pages document created solely so I wouldn’t have to go searching for the idea, others simply added to the end of a list of other forgotten ideas. What good are breakthroughs if you’re going to forget where you wrote one, or if you wrote it on the laptop or in ink (there are notebooks, too. No, I don’t know how many, just that there is the possibility of many useful ideas written in several different places)(oh, and I have a filing cabinet with all my grad school papers--see, I’m trying to be organized!).
In comes Scrivener! (shill away!) There’s a place for pictures, for your research, “index cards” for each chapter or section you divide your work into, and the option to put notes on those sections, which could eliminate the need for entire documents. I could even scan in the notebook pages and throw them in someplace.
Will I ever do this? Therein lies the problem. How much time would it take me to organize all of this, and could I ever get myself to do all that when my fingers are compelling me to fix on the next page (and do something about the plot in the next hundred pages). Now I’m afraid it wouldn’t be worth the time to import everything when that idea I had five months ago could be irrelevant for this draft.
I know one thing. My next novel (whether it's my second born or it moves to the front after a tragic demise of the first) will be much more organized. And if Scrivener ever crashes, you will hear my scream.
