Another new venture

The lure of Scrivener has tempted me for far too long.  I hear everyone raving about it and since I don’t write in any sort of an order when it comes to my longer projects I can see this being a valuable tool for me.  Since I had a 50% off coupon for completing NaNoWriMo last November I decided now was a good time to buy it.  And with the money I saved I purchased Scrapple too.

First thoughts on Scrivener…

• The 30 days trial are non-consecutive, so if you use it one day per month, the 30 days would last 30 months.  Great idea!  I have lost count of the number of times I have downloaded a free trial of something, used it for a week and come back to it after a break only to find it is now locked unless you buy it.  A proper free trial of 30 days gets a thumbs up from me… even if I didn’t use it myself.
• An hour long tutorial – if only Word did one of those inbuilt.
• Bookmarking my spot – YES!  In Word I have either added a comment to mark my place (which is no use whatever in a document full of comments) or added in a bunch of *** to “find” next time I open it.  This way of bookmarking sounds much better and less troublesome.
• Script writing mode – cool.  Makes me wish I wrote them just so I knew what the snazzy functions actually mean.
• Meta-data settings sound interesting.  Going to have to look at those a lot more as they sound pretty nifty.
• Keywords – another useful feature for tracking secondary characters at the very least.  I would hate for them to change appearance or something between chapters, or even books.
• Colour coding comments – OMG, my OCD will love that.
• Split screen to view two documents together.  My bad memory has a lifesaver at last.  Will definitely be using that one a lot.
• Saving more than one search as tabs.  If that means I can have all my nuisance words that I need to zap from my stories saved in those I have just died and gone to editing heaven.
• Exporting as PDF files.  That has possibilities.  Doesn’t seem to export in docx, just doc, but I can work with that.

So, it is now two and a half hours after I started the tutorial and I am still on it.  I think an hour was a little optimistic.  I am only at the end of Part 3, with 4 and 5 still to go.

That being said, this looks like an amazing program, though I imagine it will take a while to figure out all the little things it does.