[I installed OpenID capability on the blog today. Took about 30 seconds. I love Wordpress.]

Yesterday I grabbed some screenshots from Scrivener, now that I actually have content in it—click the images for larger.

I thought I’d use the supercool note cards on cork board to actually outline my shit for a change, but no—I fill them out as I’m writing the chapter or after it’s done. (Still a handy thing, though, when it comes to looking back through chapters for a specific detail.)

Each note card corresponds to an actual document (in this case, each document is a chapter, but they could be scenes or acts or parts—and chapters can have scenes under them, parts could have chapters under them—however you want to organize your work). It doesn’t seem like a bunch of separate documents, though, because they’re all right there; you just click from chapter to chapter. Or you can select some or all of the chapters and click “Edit Scrivenings” to work on them as (seemingly) one document.

I like how I’m able to customize the “labels” for the cards. I’ve set mine up to track POV; that’s why there are alternating push-pin colors on the cards; purple pins are Derek’s POV, and red ones are Eddie’s.

I haven’t done a whole lot with the character section. There’s not much more on the info pages for the characters than you see on the note cards in the screen cap. Alan’s info page, for example, just has an extra detail about a pet rat. It is handy to have a place to stick that info; I just, well, like with the outline, I keep most of that information in my head. (It’s also nice to have a place to stick Sims Body Shop representations of the characters. I can do the same thing with locations—stick in a blueprint of the textile mill or a photo of a maintenance floor hatch on a bus, etc.)

On the right-hand side about halfway down in this screen grab you can see a “Document References” section. This is cool. You just drag stuff over from the left-hand side, any stuff that pertains to the scene or chapter. Then when you’re writing, you can quickly access that data without having to scroll for it. Even better: you can include website URLs, so your web research can be connected to your project.

If you click the little notepad icon at the bottom of the Document References section, the Document Notes section opens, which is also really handy. I’ve been in love with being able to add quick notes for something I’m writing since I first used Rough Draft four years ago, so it’s always nice to be using a program that allows that. (When I’ve used MS Word, Q10 and other word processors that don’t have that capability, I put notes right in the middle of everything, bracketed and in all caps. It’s not as neat a solution.)

I love Scrivener. Unfortunately this super awesome program is only available for Macs. Windows users can check out yWriter, though, which has the extra benefit of being free.

And now I’m gonna fire Scrivener up and pass the 30K mark on this book….