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.
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