And I cast another vote for Scrivener — I’ve been using it for several months and written about 25,000 words of a novel in it.

I have only one concern with it — I’m a little bit fanatical about standardizing formats for word-processing files. Some science-fiction writers will occasionally try to access a story they wrote twenty years ago in a word-processor that doesn’t exist anymore, and they find they can’t open the file. I’m worried about that happening with Scrivener. For that reason, I’m thinking of switching at some point to plain text files for drafts, then importing to Word for the final draft.

OTOH, Scrivener is just so damn good, I’m in no rush to make the change.

The New York Times reviewed Scrivener a day or two ago. Your review is better.

http://lisayee.livejournal.com/60457.html

Sigh.

Oh, the word tool of Satan, it’s a-
Comin’ for you, brother! It’s a-
Comin’ for you, sister!
Just! Say! No!

I found out about this program about a year ago when I first learned Holly liked it. I haven’t found a mac yet, and with such an in depth look at the program, you’re making me crave a mac again!

I dabbled with q10 during nano, and liked the mandatory full screen mode. It also made typewriter noises as you typed. I had two problems with it, I use italics for character thoughts, so when I switched over to word, I had to comb through the document to find all the ‘thought quotes.’ search didn’t help, because I found all of the normal apostrophes.

I used open office’s writer after that, because I couldn’t find a copy of word that would transfer to my archaic laptop. Off nano’s forums, I found out word has an outline feature, which makes it really convenient to separate chapters and scenes.

i tried ywriter too, but wasn’t impressed.

Lucky you with Scrivener! Oh well.

I’ll have to go pick up prom nights from hell. I got 21 proms, and didn’t realize there was a similar compilation out by the other half of my favorite authors.

My trial goes on for a few weeks more, but I’ll be out of town for most of them.

In all my years using Word for Mac, all my manuscripts, I’ve never had a problem keeping my entire manuscript in one file (knock wood). Splitting them up into chapter files also wouldn’t work for me.

I use word, which works well enough. (especially after having written by hand for a couple of months – definitely enough to make one appreciate it). However, I do find it frustrating having to open several (some of them rather lengthy) documents and then constantly flip between them. I’ve often thought there must be a better way! And I only use page breaks to divide up my documents so I can find things (like particular chapters) in them; the rest of the time I use views where they are basically irrelevant.
Scrivener sounds fantastic. I’m terribly annoyed.

Open Office isn’t as pretty (or as advanced) as word 2007 but it does what i need it to do so i’m not complaining.

Scrivener sounds fantastic though.

i use the inspector when i’m editing too, to put reminders about all the stuff that needs to be added/changed for that chapter, and then delete them as i go.

also, i have a scrivener file to store all my short stories (all=2.5), so when someone says ‘do you have a short story’ i know where to find them all.

AND finally, i love the ‘targets’ function, so I can say i am writing 2000 words today, and i’m not allowed to watch 30 rock until i do.

PS: I hate Word with the heat of a thousand burning suns, too, but I am not able to upgrade to happy Macland right now. Boo hisss!

I can see that might not work so well for novels though….

I went roundabout and opened the .scriv files via Document. Scrivener asked me if I wanted to update the files to the new version. I was then warned that I could not try to reopen the updated files with an older version in the future. If I did, Scrivener would update the files again, and likely corrupt them.

Anyway, I updated the files. So far, I can’t get my character sketches to display on Corkboard. The text is still saved, because it shows up when I mouse over the character names on the sidebar. But I can’t open the corkboard itself.

still working through it.

My favorite feature so far is the index card board, where I can write quick character sketches.

As a computer geek, I am often working with GB sized log files and I use TextPad.exe. It can pretty much handle anything.

BTW – is that just Word for mac that is being complained about or is it PC word too? I’m still learning to be more mac savvy these days and haven’t used word on mac to see if/how different it is from the pc version.