ŷ������

And I am just going to pick up right where I left off ��

Organizing

The Corkboard view gives you the option of seeing the outline of your novel in an outline view, a corkboard view, or as snippets of your manuscript. I am enjoying the Outliner��view, but have also used the Corkboard.��The Scrivenings view is the view in which you edit your manuscript.

Here is a screenshot of the Outliner view for the first chapter of my work-in-progress. Click to enlarge.

Scrivener Outliner View



Worldbuilding

I was the most skeptical about the ability for Scrivener to replace my worldbuilding gazetteer. I have used TiddlyWiki for all the novels I have written in the last dozen or so years. However, due to the new security features that browsers were forced to implement in response to hackers, this has become less convenient. I use the modern version of TiddlyWiki, which operates out of a desktop app, but again, having all the gazetteer elements in my manuscript file seems very convenient.

Scrivener handles this well. Linking from one document to another is not as convenient as using a wikiword, but it is not cumbersome, either. Create your folder of concepts, and link them together by right-clicking and selecting Scrivener Link and browsing to your document.

You can also drag and drop page links. Here’s a snapshot of one of my characters from my WIP:

Links within Documents



Researching

At present, I am not writing a novel that requires much research, because it takes place in an alternate galaxy. No history needed, and my science elements are, so far, within my body of knowledge. I only need to do some light space research for some very specific questions.

Scrivener does include the ability to capture a PDF of a webpage. However, my efforts to download

all failed except the option to export using MSOffice, and it produced badly formatted output.

Ultimately, I found a better solution by saving the webpage as a pdf using the browser print functions, and then import that, (which is what I hoped Scrivener would do automagically). The reason I want to capture a hard copy of the webpage–with a datestamp and the original web address–is because web pages can disappear, and it is helpful to have the webpage as it existed when you found it.

Imported Document

As you can probably tell, I have been very pleased with Scrivener. I now only use Word for documents that I started in Word because I have not found any good way to import a Word document without having a lot of manual work for breaking it into chapters and scenes.

Other features I’ve used:

Written a screenplay. The screenplay mode is so powerful that it actually taught me how to write a screenplay. I took one of my “Petroleum Sunset�� short stories and made it in to a complete screenplay, just for fun. I can see easily modifying the screenplay output to work as a comic book “screenplay�� as well, which uses a modified screenplay outputCreated my own templates. Scrivener provides templates for Characters and Settings right out of the box, and I added one for Concepts. I find Scrivener tables difficult to use, so I lay it out in Word and paste it into the template. Once there, it works just fine.Messed around with Keywords and Custom Meta-Data, but ultimately did not find them very useful so far.Changed the default font of my manuscript so it is easy-on-the-eyes Bookman Old Style. I can use whatever font I want when I eventually compile.

I have not yet completed or compiled a manuscript. Once I am ready to start submitting something again, here’s my plan:

Create a new section in the binder for queries. Right now, I keep all query versions in a very long Word document that has every change I made to the query over time. Obsessive? Maybe, but I got tired of looking in old emails for that one particular version of the query. I want to keep every version that I personalized for every agent, because I end up doing that anyway and it’ll be much easier this way.Create another section in the binder for synopses. I generally have a six-to-eight sentence synopsis, another version with six to eight paragraphs, which usually takes about one page, and a longer version, not much longer than two pages. With versions, of course.

On my wishlist:

I wish Scrivener would improve the table functionality. It is terrible. True, I don’t use tables at all in a manuscript, but I use them extensively in my wiki.When I link a document in the Inspector (the right panel) I really wish I could see the link from the other end. When I click on a character, I would love for the Inspector to show all the documents that I linked that character to. I think this should easily be added because scrivener probably uses a relational database and databases are �� yanno, relational.They should put some thought into a less cumbersome way of importing a document and breaking it into chapters and scenes. I may have overlooked a feature, but I tried twice and as a business analyst, I am pretty darned savvy about how software should work. This should be easier.Add a real help system. To learn how to do something, you have to crack open the user manual PDF. This is a lazy developer’s help system. Get serious about your software.

One final note–Scrivener 3 was just released. If you have a Mac, you’re in luck–it’s already available. This review covers the current Windows version. If you have a Windows machine and buy the current version, you will get a free upgrade when Scrivener 3 becomes available. I will have to fork over 25 dollars, but it seems worth it.

Overall verdict: I recommend scrivener if you are a serious novelist or screen-playwright. Some of the features are a bit archaic and it can be a challenge to figure out how to do things. But once you get over the learning curve, it is a highly useful tool, and Version 3 shows great promise for even better usability.

Note: it was taking me forever to finish this post, so I decided to break it into several parts. I will link them all together when complete.

As I get a bit–ahem–older, I find myself less tolerant of time-wasters. And I find myself classifying more things as time-wasters. I have realized that my current system of writing is inefficient. Here are the features that I need (or at least, want badly) in a writing program.

Drafting �� A place to draft my manuscript, manuscript segments, queries, submissions and discards. Currently, I use Microsoft Word.
Organizing �� A robust way to browse the structure of a manuscript. In MSWord, I use the Navigation Pane combined with Word Styles for plotting. I am also aware that this method is my workaround for a feature that I would like to have.
Worldbuilding �� A convenient way to build and hyperlink worldbuilding gazetteer pages. I currently use TiddlyWiki and Tiddly Desktop.
Research �� Browser bookmarks for keeping track of research sources, the vast majority of which is online, and which can change or disappear.






Scrivener “About�� Screen

I decided to try Scrivener. I would look at it from the standpoint of a business analyst (which is what I do for a living) as well as a writer. The above features are the features that a product would need to have that might lure me away from my current Microsoft Word / TiddlyWiki solution.

We call these MVP features, or Minimum Viable Product features.

I downloaded the free version and after viewing part of the tutorial–I determined that the first two feature were in place. I could use the binder for all text–manuscript, discards, and queries. The Novel With Parts template also provided character and place templates, and I can easily add more.

And more importantly, I could link them all together, for my worldbuilding gazetteer.

It was enough to make me purchase the program. I’ve been working with it for about a year now, and I have been drafting this review for almost as long!

Main Scrivener Window





Drafting

Next, I started writing a new novel. I already had several versions of opening chapters, all of which I discarded (because I thought of a new angle), and a fairly robust worldbuilding gazetteer. The interface had all the features that I wanted, and just when I was wishing for a way for the main toolbar to be more flexible, I found an option to make it so. There is a cool way for you to make the entire interface go away except your text, and your current position stays in the middle of the screen, instead of being added to the bottom. I didn’t even know I needed that. Sweet.

Full Screen View

The font formatting seems rudimentary, but I strongly suspect that is because I am using the Novel With Parts template, which uses the Courier font by default. After a bit of digging in the documentation, I was able to figure out how to replace Courier with the more eye-friendly Bookman Old Style font.

None of it matters for the final draft, because once you compile the final document, it follows a different format. I have not yet attempted a compile.

Organizing





The Binder

As you could see from the main window screenshot above, the Document With Parts includes �� a lot of parts. Here’s the sidebar, which you use to navigate those parts.

The first section is devoted to the manuscript, and the section below has whatever supporting material you need. The template came with the Characters, Places, Front Matter, Research, Template Sheets and Trash. I added Concepts.

I also replaced all the templates with my own creations. I have a template I have been using for years to visualize a character.

Once you create a template, it is just a right-click away from anywhere in the sidebar, and you can link your documents together with “Scrivener Links.��

As you can tell, I am pretty pleased with Scrivener. I also should mention that there is a major upgrade planned to be released to Windows later this year. It is already available for Macs.

I plan to write additional posts to cover worldbuilding, research and screenwriting. Stay tuned!

��

Wow, it’s been a long time since I spent most of the day fixing up my website. I installed SSO, so this site now uses a secure connection. While I was at it, I reconnected Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools, but I really haven’t paid much attention to that stuff since the Fantasy Debut days. Narcissism only brings you so much happiness, after all.

I know, I know, there are good reasons to use such tools other than narcissism, which is why I reactivated them.

I also found a new theme that handles things quite a bit differently. I am considering buying the pro version so I can have a slew of additional options. First, I’ll get to know the options that come with the free version.

I also started a complete sweep through the site to clean up dead and invalid links. So far, I have done the home page and the book pages. I have a lot of pages I am not using, so I will take a look at them to determine if I think I will ever use them again. If not, I may as well delete them.

Let me know if you see any issues!

Way, way back in the early days of the Internet, when cellphones were still luxury items, and pagers were ubiquitous on people’s belts, people would put an “Under Construction�� icon on their websites while it was undergoing major changes.��

I’m not going to do that, but I have made some changes. This website will now open with an “https�� link instead of “http��, which means it uses a secure connection. Search engines like it better. I also reactivate my Google Sitemaster Tools and Google Analytics, which I never bothered to reactivate after moving off wordpress.com.

But now, I am making changes to the theme. I have always wanted a parallax theme, because they are pretty and it will incentivize me to use more images. So the theme of this website may change throughout the weekend. I also may use a child theme, so I can make changes behind the scenes before making them live, but WordPress does not make that straightforward, so I’ll have to learn how to do it, first.

Since starting my new job, I’ve made strides toward reclaiming my old “normal�� life:

I was able to resume my 7:30 to 4 shift for three days out of the last five, a schedule I have preferred since my military days. I am not juggling the roles of product manager, scrum master, software designer and requirements analyst all at once. I am only a requirements analyst, albeit a senior one. How refreshing.I bought a novel! Even though I once read Robin Hobb’s ASSASSIN’S APPRENTICE, I bought it again on the recommendation of my sister, who has read the entire series. I never read any of the other books, so this will give me a fresh start. In return, I recommended .I practiced my violin a lot. It’s addictive. And I definitely brain better when I play. My work requires a lot of braining.I have not written much. Ok, so I have not written at all. Not really my old normal, but it’ll pass. One possible reason is one of my books is being beta-read, and I usually take a break during such times.Instead of writing, I’ve been playing a computer game. I think I’ll review it once I’ve finished battling the final Big Bad, which should be this week. Yes, it’s another game that’s probably older than some of you are, .I’m sleeping better. Accidental timing? I think not. Also, I’m less wiped out when I get home, and my husband says that I am more patient.

Looking forward to seeing what the next week brings!

Lots of changes over the past month. The biggest was a job change. I started a new job on Monday. This is the first time I have voluntarily changed jobs since 2004. I usually make companies make me leave.

In this case, I could not blame my boss, who was wonderful. My co-workers were wonderful, and I definitely felt appreciated. Our clients liked and trusted me. I had a lot of influence.��

But our company was in way over its head and had a policy (unofficial, of course) of hiring the least number of people they could get away with, and then squeeze them dry. Even the HR director (who I trusted) was frustrated about the slow pace of hiring. Our QA people regularly worked weekends. So did the release team. I did not. I set the expectation early that I would not, and I stuck to it, and only worked extra hours when it was truly warranted. However, due to its minimal staffing, the company was constantly in a crisis.

So when a company found me on LinkedIn and pitched a position to me, I perked up because it seemed like a good fit. It was. As I left my last interview with them, I reflected that the company would be hard-pressed to find anyone more qualified than I. I had a job offer in my inbox the next morning. Early.

So after trying my best to leave my previous employer in as good shape as possible, I started on Monday. It is very promising.

Anyway, that’s where I’ve been. After working (at my old job) I was too zonked to blog. After my last day, I zipped down to Melbourne to visit my mother because it will be difficult getting time off for a few months. However, that trip was a bit much, and I probably should not have done it. Today, I am catching up on some email/computer/website tasks, and I need to pick my new job benefits.

I am hoping this job not take so much out of me, and to maybe start doing more of my old activities. So far, it is pretty promising because they are hiring!

�� or maybe I should have titled this “How I am Spending My Staycation�� because I have another day to go.

We do lots of staycations. We love going places and seeing things, but sometimes, we just want to veg.

However, during this staycation I’ve been pretty active. I’ve met my exercise goal every day of this staycation except maybe today �� nope, I’m on track again today.

Usually, when I take a staycation, I write a lot. And I did get in a couple of good writing sessions on Saturday. But not much since.

Instead, I have been on a tear on my violin. I spent this summer on a quest to get the best sound possible out of my violin. It was playing particularly badly. I had tried a D string out of aluminum rather than silver because they kept fraying, but the sound was like a sick french horn. I could almost not bear to play it. The A string wasn’t much better, and the G string would slip under the bow.

Since I knew that the violin once sounded pretty good, I took it to a different luthier–one in Melbourne rather than in my hometown. I asked for his opinion of the bow and the violin, and he told me he thought they were both better than “student violins��. I took that to mean they had hope. He replaced the bridge and the sound post with upgraded versions (who knew?), and put better-quality hair on the bow. I took it home and noticed some improvement after a settling in period of about a week. Then, I changed the strings to a set that promised a warmer sound.

And suddenly, my violin was fun to play again.

Choir practice started again last week, so I had lots of new music to practice, plus I continued some favorites. I have been working all summer on Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring, a piece that almost every intermediate student learns in order to master “bow crossings��, which is moving from one string to another under one bow stroke. It’s hard to play well this way. I have also been working on Dust in the Wind, because it is a nice challenge and everyone knows it. I recently added Hava Nagila, a Jewish anthem, because it really rocks, and I came up with an arrangement that includes some bow bouncing techniques that I want to master.

So other than hanging out with my daughter and my husband, that’s how I’m spending my staycation. I’m back to work on Thursday.

But for now, I’m off for my second practice session of the day!

It’s amazing how one blog post can lead to another.

Last week, I vowed to with blog posting and reading. Well, that plan encountered a few snags. Good thing I’m persistent.

Snag #1 �� No RSS Feeds

I had two visitors in my last post who have blogs, and whose feed I wanted to add to my feed reader. Alas, their websites do not include feeds. Which led me to a realization and a related snag.

Snag #2 �� RSS Feeds are Passe

I don’t really care about this. I vowed to go old school, and RSS definitely qualifies.��

(What's with all the headings, you might ask? Well, my blog has this spiffy new Gutenberg editor, and I'm playing around with it. This is a Preformatted block.)

So I did some research. I Googled “Is RSS obsolete��. Some articles, dated 2013 and 2015, answered with a resounding yes, and talked all about how Facebook are sooo much better, because they’ll curate you, dontchaknow.

Whenever I read about “curated�� websites, think of museum curators, who put together the displays based on what they think you would want to pay money to see. In the case of Facebook and Twitter, the curator is the Algorithm, and it shoves you content based on what it thinks will keep you on their site long enough to serve you more ads. That’s why you get articles with titles like “Stacy Starborn no longer plucks her eyebrows! Here’s why!��. And “She was jaw-dropping in 1998. See what she looks like today!��

If I want to be curated, I’ll go to a museum.

–M��

But one stood out, an article at Gizmodo:��

(So yes, I was looking for people who were thinking like me.)

Per the article, RSS feeds are useful precisely because they do not attempt “curation��. The author didn’t actually say, that; it’s my summary. If I want to be curated, I’ll go to a museum.

And besides, it seems that most professional websites still use RSS feeds because, well, it’s simple. It was called Really Simple Syndication for a reason, and countless APIs (website communication thingies) already use them. No point in throwing it away at all.

Snag #3 �� My Feed Reader is Lazy

Good old Google Reader used to wrest a feed out of any blog, whether it published an RSS feed or not. My feed reader, Inoreader, could not find a feed on several websites. Research leads me to believe that this may be a “pro�� feature. I have not looked into it yet. My approach was to leave nice comments on the blogs in question, asking them to please publish a feed.

[image error]Google Reader Today (sniff!)

Yes, I could subscribe to the websites via other means and get emails. But honestly, those emails will just get lost. When you have had the same email address ever since Google opened Gmail to all comers, you have a lot of junk coming to that inbox. And most of the time, when I look at email, I am not blog surfing at that time. I blog surf on a bit of a schedule.

To get around all of these snags, I’m going to do a few things:

Continue to nicely ask owners of interesting blogs to publish a feed,See what the “pro�� level of Inoreader will get me, and determine if it is worth it,Check out how IFTTT might help, per the suggestion in the Gizmoto article that I linked above, which was an intriguing suggestion.

Any other suggestions?

Anyone looking over this website for the first time will justifiably come to the conclusion that I have lost interest in blogging. That’s really not true at all. I merely got discouraged.

Part of the “sell�� in setting up profiles on social media is to help you “engage�� and get your stuff noticed. For me, it had an opposite effect.

I started blogging in 2007 with the launch of Fantasy Debut. It was the third blog I started. The first few had no readers whatsoever, except spammers. But when I launched Fantasy Debut with the release of ‘s first book, Magic Lost, Trouble Found, little did I know that she would notice immediately. I posted an as-I-read-it review of the opening chapters. She left my very first comment. By the end of that book, I had already attracted several avid readers, some of whom had blogs of their own. Naturally, I checked out their blogs and learned of even more books–and blogs.

The community grew organically from there. Or rather, I joined the already-growing community. A lot of us made our start that year.

For a while–I admit–I got a little carried away. I posted a lot, and when I wasn’t posting, I was reading other reviews, and when I wasn’t doing either of that, I was checking out my blog stats. It was downright narcissistic, and when I realized that, I deleted my link to Google Analytics and focused on content.

I was never a superstar. But my blog had a respectable following, and I could tell how “engaged�� people was by the number of comments they left. I moved my site to tianevitt.com and renamed it Debuts and Reviews. Thanks to Feedburner, I was able to take most of my readership with me, and the others seemed to follow.

When Twitter became popular, I signed up. I did the same for Facebook. For a while, all went well. Someone once described Twitter to me as a river of posts that I could stick my toe in at any time to see what was going by. Facebook was the same way. Yes, I didn’t see everything, but I did see a wide selection of content from people that I followed, and I read a wide variety of posts. Thanks to retweets and reposts, I do think I saw everything worth seeing. Both sites drove traffic to my site, but, when I did go back to Google Analytics, I noticed that my blog was really no bigger than before.

I retired Debuts and Reviews after The Sevenfold Spell was published, and my readership consequently–as anticipated–declined. I am not blaming Facebook or Twitter for that. I knew it would happen.

But then, along came the new Algorithms.

Behind the scenes, first Facebook and then Twitter started arranging the timelines differently. Two things happened simultaneously–I began seeing the same people over and over in my feed, and fewer people reacted to mine. The bottom fell out of my “engagement��.

Apparently, the Algorithm had decided that I was a bore. Which may be true.

However, I never spent a lot of time engaging on those sites because I was busy engaging on blogs. When I read a post on Twitter or Facebook, I would click through to the website and leave my comment there. Apparently, I ought to have either tweeted a reply, or left a Facebook comment. And maybe I ought to have paid to “boost�� my posts. The fact that I never changed my behavior made me an undesirable.

Over on Twitter, I noticed that my feed was littered with retweets from the same few people. I was unwilling to unfriend them, but Twitter apparently rated their feeds very high, maybe due to their status as prolific retweeters.

During the same timespan, Google Reader discontinued itself, and I never found a satisfactory replacement.

Over time, my readership dwindled to a few that I can call long-term friends. They still read all my posts and they come by to comment, which makes me happy.

However, it is very discouraging to post stuff that few people seem to ever see. So I actually did so less and less often.

~*~

That’s not the end to this story. I’ve decided to try again. How?

I’m Going Old School!

Google Reader ain’t coming back, so I looked around for an alternative, from which I will be starting from scratch. Therefore, I signed up for and installed Inoreader on my iPad. I added first, sine I knew Kristen was still blogging. I also knew that she still maintained a blogroll (which kindly still lists this blog). From there, I found two other live blogs that I remembered that are still active�� and .��Another site I looked at,��, doesn’t have an RSS feed. So I subscribed via WordPress.

As for this site, my old Feedburner RSS feed still works, and is still attached to this website. I also have subscribers to this blog via WordPress, and I will look into what else is out there now, since RSS is the Way of the Past–not the Future.

Twitter

There is some hope for Twitter. I figured out how to restore the original feed by unclicking an option in Settings for Show the Best Tweets First. Kudos to Twitter for providing that option. Boos to Twitter for turning it on without telling me in the first place.

Assuming my tweets are not rated “Best��, here’s how to see a greater variety of tweets (including mine!) in your feed:

Click the little round icon for your account in the upper right heading bar.
Click Account
Scroll down to Content
Unclick “Show the best Tweets first��

You will NOT regret it. It’s like getting the old Twitter back.

Facebook

Facebook makes it MUCH harder. You can select people to prioritize so they appear at the top of your feed, but there’s no blanket “Just show everything ordered by time�� option.

So I’m still researching it. It may be a lost cause.

Blogrolling

I’m reluctant to announce things, because I tend to forget about my newfound commitment and not follow through. But, I’m going to go ahead an announce this. The next step in bringing back my blogging mojo will be to start blogrolling again. what’s blogrolling, you may ask? When I find interesting stuff, I’ll favorite it in Inoreader, and then post about it here, on an as-I-think-of-it basis.

Let’s see how this works out.

I have what I think is a good reason for not blogging lately. I have just been finishing the danged books.

It seems that I put up this new website last year, and once I got that accomplished, I pretty much devoted almost all of my writing efforts to my books. I guess that isn’t a bad thing. But it’s terrible for my social media footprint.

First, I decided to rewrite one of my novels in third person. I had been waffling on that for a few months, but I knew it was the right thing to do. Then, a recent news story really helped me strengthen one of the main conflicts. I finished that rewrite and polished and considered it “query ready�� by January. I rewrote the synopsis, and polished up the query.

But then what did I do? I dove right into my other novel, which was in the midst of a rewrite as well, and now I am finishing up that one. I have been having rewrite fever.

I have not even been reading much this year. The number of books I’ve read this year has been tragically low.

Oh, and I also started writing what I consider to be the space epic I have always wanted to write. For years I have been writing little snips and setting them aside, knowing they weren’t quite what I wanted, and looking for that big idea. Well, it all came together, and I’ve started the opening scenes in Scrivener, which I purchased a while back. I am also incorporated many of those old ideas, and am pretty happy with what is coming together.

But that’s a side activity while I finish this rewrite.

Honestly, for a while last year when I was going through a period of fragile health, I wondered if I had lost that writing spark. But it is difficult to keep the writing spark when you cannot sleep more than 5 hours a night and your immune system is recovering from powerful antibiotics. Once I fully recovered, I not only started writing again, but I am playing my violin consistently as well.

So that’s what I’ve been up to. Hope everyone has been well!

��