[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….

The free Notebook personal notebook application (available for both Windows and Macs) is what I’m using to keep track of character back story, locations and anything else that needs keeping track of while I write Deadlock Rot. (IMPORTANT NOTE: Ignore the IMPORTANT NOTE on the page I’ve linked to. It will bring you to a site that’s about the development of the next version of Notebook, but what you want is the current version of Notebook, available from the “Downloads” link on that page.)

What Notebook really is is a personal wiki. You’re not really going to get excited about this application if you’re not already addicted accustomed to editing wikis, but if you are addicted accustomed–whoa. It’s nice (if not slick looking). For the most part, Notebook uses the MediaWiki convention for marking up text (and offers HTML-like mark-up a well). And like yWriter4 (see yesterday’s entry), you can use the Pendrive Runtime application to run it off a USB flash drive.

The only annoying thing is that it won’t let you rename the “Home” page–at least not so far as I can tell. But it’s got these other cool customizable things, like you can define what you want to show up in the pop-up menu when you right-click on a page. You can also create “magic buttons” that execute commands. You can even do some scripting with it. And you can create “macros” (not the cat kind) that let you quickly add common information to pages, like say you want to add a link to the main “characters” page at the bottom of every character’s page–you’d make a macro once and cut down all that extra typing you’d have to do.

Most of these things you won’t find useful, though, if you’re just focusing on keeping track of information for your novel. For Deadlock Rot, I’ve set up the home page with a list of characters, locations, themes and plot notes, with each item in each section linking to more information about that. And of course since it’s a wiki, when I first mention Jeff’s name on David’s character page, I can turn Jeff’s name into a link to Jeff’s page. When I say that David lives in Marigny, I can have “Marigny” link to the info page on that neighborhood. I can also add images to the wiki pages–like a map of Marigny. (Notebook can only handle .GIF files off the shelf, but you can install an extension to add .JPG capability.)

As I progress, I’ll probably have to break the main page up into several pages–I’m sure I’ll be adding more sections as I go (in fact–there!–I just added a section for events going on in the area during the times the novel takes place).

I do wish it automatically created tables of contents for pages the way MediaWiki does, and I wish there was a way to sort the index sidebar besides alphabetically or by date (I’d like a hierarchy tree), but I can get by without these extras.

(One nicety I just discovered is that if you change a page name, Notebook automatically updates all links to that page throughout your wiki. This is great because I keep wavering on David’s surname.)

I spent the afternoon poking around “best of 2007″ book lists looking for stuff to add to my 2008 reading list. I’d set out to read 50 books this year but only made it through 37, so 2008’s goal is 37 + 6 (surely I can squeeze an extra half book a month in, right?). It’s frustrating how many titles aren’t available as ebooks (not even as Kindle editions–in a look at ten random books on my Wish List, only two were available for the Kindle), and it’s depressing how few of the “best” books of 2007 are catching my interest. (On the other hand, it’s not as though I’m running low on books to read. THERE IS NOT ENOUGH TIME TO READ ALL THE BOOKS!)

The five books I enjoyed the most in 2007:

The Road, Cormac McCarthy (READ THIS BOOK)
Rant, Chuck Palahniuk
Pattern Recognition, William Gibson
The Crimson Petal and the White, Michael Faber (despite the ending)
Cell, Stephen King (I even liked the ending)

¹This entry has no footnotes

I discovered this free software for organizing your novel back when it was just plain old yWriter, and now it’s up to version 4 (for PC and Linux only¹–sorry Mac users²). It’s actually more than an organizer–you can actually write your novel in yWriter4.

Every novel in yWriter is a “project,” and for every project you can include characters, objects, locations (settings), scenes and chapters. Dragging and dropping scenes and chapters makes it easy to reorganize the story.

Some screenshots (click for larger):

When it comes to scenes, you can get incredibly anal about them. In addition to a big block where you can type (or copy and paste) the actual scene is a set of tabs: Description, Status, Goals, Time, Scene Notes, Characters, Viewpoint Details and Overview. “Status,” for instance, is where you can say whether the scene relates to the main plot or to a subplot and say whether the scene is at this point an outline, draft, first edit, second edit or done. Under “Goals,” you can say whether the scene is an action scene or a reaction scene, and define the goal, conflict and outcome for the scene. “Time” lets you say when the scene happens and what time span it covers. “Characters” lets you select the characters who appear in the scene. All of this information helps you see the structure of your story.

This software is ideal for people who are anal and love to organize, but be careful: you can easily spend all your time working on information about scenes instead of actually writing the scenes.

Finally, if you already have a draft of a novel, yWriter can import it, provided you save it as RTF. Include chapter headings (Chapter 1, Chapter 2, etc.) and scene breaks (***) in the file, and yWriter will automatically create chapters and scenes in the project as it imports.

Here’s the yWriter website: http://www.spacejock.com/yWriter4.html. Again, the software is free.

In additional to all this, there’s one more very cool thing about yWriter: you can make it run from a USB flash drive. This is perfect for people who write at work or school and at home. After you download and install yWriter on your computer, drag or copy the folder to your flash drive. Then download the “Pendrive Runtimes” application at the bottom of this page. When you run Pendrive Runtimes, it will ask where the folder is. Enter its location on your flash drive (for example “F:\yWriter4″). It will install some extra stuff on the flash drive, and then you’ll be able to run yWriter from any Windows PC.

All that said…I’m not actually using yWriter4 for Deadlock Rot (though I will be when I start the Growl Mercy revision in the spring–different books, different needs). I’ll show you what I’m using for Deadlock Rot tomorrow.

Speaking of Deadlock Rot, dialog scribbles and scene notes are beginning to accumulate in scraps of paper around my desk. I’m happy to see them. :)

Also, I’ve figured out how to sum up the book in one word. I’ve been reading James Scott Bell’s Plot and Structure this weekend (Christmas gift from my mom–isn’t she great?), and there was a point where he did the ol’ “Describe your story in a sentence or two” thing, which…I’m so not prepared to do with this story yet. I think I need to get through much, if not most–if not all!–of it before I can compress it back down to a few sentences. But I have a word now (which means I’m probably onto a theme, too): obsession.

Last night as I was falling asleep, I realized that that was the one thing my three disparate main characters had in common. (Okay, the one of two things: they’re also all male. But anyway) Derrel is obsessed with something he believes is rightfully his that has been withheld from him all his life. Jeff is obsessed with collecting refuse. Or, actually, he’s obsessed with staying right where he is; collecting refuse is a mechanism he uses to keep his life from moving forward. And over the course of the story, David becomes obsessed with his Tragic Hero. I think he was looking for a Tragic Hero all along.

David’s my narrator. I think he’s going to do an all right job.

¹Linux users should read the note on the Download page on how to get it working on their system.
²There is a similar program for Mac users: Jer’s Novel Writer.