Hypnotized By The Glitter

 

  I’ve upgraded my main writing program (Scrivener) to Version 3. Not just “main”, but practically “ONLY”.

Scrivener is a fantastically useful, fantastically complex chunk of software that I’ve used for stories, novellas, occasional stabs at books, reports, lesson plans — if it involves writing, this stuff is the shit.

It ain’t for everyone, but there are a lot of people (including me) who use it for short stories because it allows highly visual and organized editing and swapping of sections around without doing the PITA MS Word dance with cut-and-paste.

On the other hand, there are a lot of people who are and have used it for writing their multi-year Doctoral thesis because it will keep track of bookmarks, links, keywords, research, citations, bibliographies, and allows it all to be rearranged and reorganized on a whim… If I live a long life writing every single day, there’s practically zero likelihood I’ll use all the features.

I’ve used the older version for years while waiting on the code-monkeys at Literature and Latte (the software company) to get their shit together and release the Windows version of the latest and greatest. And now they have — and while it bears a strong genetic resemblance to the previous version (which similarity allowed me to jump right in and start rooting around) there are substantial differences that make it essentially a whole new thinger.

Took me nearly three days to sort it all out and get it set up to suit me, during which time I also worked out the kinks in my relationship with Zotero, an information clipping and citation program. I incidentally even found a way to make them more-or-less work together.

Boy howdy, I’m ready to write now. Heh…

But here’s the thing: This is not an advert for Scrivener. This is acknowledgment that I’m a writing software/process/book/instruction/methodology junkie.

If possession of enough software was in fact as useful as the software writers make it sound, I’d have long since coughed up the Great American Novel and be writing opinion pieces for the NY Times and advice columns that would put the ghosts of Dear Abby and Ann Landers out of business. My popular books would be coming out as regular as a tolling bell, and so many of them would go Hollywood that it would make Steven King and Neil Gaiman look like rank amateurs.

In actual fact, I can barely stay on top of occasionally chipping away at a few stories I have in the mix, lots of reports on a variety of work-related junk, and now and again a lesson plan.

Oh, yeah, and I post random crapola three or four times a month here, every line of which starts out as a Scrivener entry.

In short, if I spent as much time actually writing as I do setting up writing software, reading about writing, and learning techniques of writing, my output would leave Palmjob from the old usenet days in the dust.

(If you don’t know who Palmjob is, or what usenet is, or any of that — it’s Pony-Express/Early-Internet old stuff from the Wayback times, and Palmjob wrote fire-hydrant-volume blasts of vaguely coherent texts on any subject imaginable multiple times per day. It’s unclear whether he was even human, with many saying he was an early bot or a tag-team of trolls. Either way, it was a lot.)

But, no. I’m the guy with the garage-full of rare and new cars who actually barely gets out on the road for a couple of hours per month, but is always on the lookout for the Next High-Speed Thing.

The fact of the matter is that what anyone needs to write is (a) a piece of paper and (b) something that will make a mark on it. Everything above that is extra. And, so far as I can tell, I have everything above that.

But now I have Scrivener’s latest version (I really am a huge fan, by the way) so my life, for the moment, is complete. Now if I can just get that niggling little “Get Off Your Ass And Write Something” problem nailed down, it’s all gravy from here.