Tag Archives: Writing Software

Scrivener [for Windows] is Coming!

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Update: Scrivener [for Windows] is Here!

A few weeks ago, I was moaning (as I often do) about the working state of my MacBook, crying and tanting about how it was dying and I didn’t want to write without using Scrivener (the very reason I bought my Mac(s) in the first place, and the reason I’ve bought another — I hope Apple appreciate the Scrivener team, because I’m more than a little confident that I’m not the only one to do this!). Since I mentioned the Scrivener Twitter account in my rant, I got a very nice response from DJ, hinting that it might not be too long until the Windows version was finally released.

The link DJ provided at the time was to a tiny pocket of the Literature and Latte web site, which has been there since I started using the software. It basically said that there wasn’t a version available yet, but that one day it would be a possibility, and offered an e-mail sign-up to a newsletter. Having already done this over 12 months ago, I ignored it.

Mere days later, my tether finally snapped with my MacBook and I sold it on eBay along with the ill-fated Mac Mini, which never really did anything wrong, but which I was always slightly embittered towards, because it wasn’t a MacBook, and I shouldn’t have had any need to buy it, because the MacBook should have just fucking worked in the first place!

Anyway, yes, the MacBook was gone, and deciding that the information from DJ was just sweet placation, I also put an order in for a new MacBook Pro.

I come from a World of Warcraft experience of software development, where Soon™ means anything from tomorrow to the end of time, like so:

Full information on Soon™ can be found here.

So when I was told that a Windows version of Scrivener was coming soon, I brushed it off entirely, went ahead and bought a new laptop anyway.

Another handful of days later, before my new machine had even arrived (it still hasn’t, stupid Apple delivery times), the Scrivener twitter was abuzz with new information about the release of Scrivener for Windows. I was naturally flabbergasted and feeling more than a little sheepish. That’ll teach me to ignore information from a software developer.

Full information from this update, including movie demonstrations of how it’s going to work, can be found here.

Almost thankfully for me, it’s been announced that this Windows update — although coming — isn’t due for release until early 2011. That doesn’t seem like far away, but when you think there’s NaNoWriMo sandwiched in between today and the proposed release date, it’s still understandable why I would want to have the existing Mac version.

In any case, I have learned two things from this experience:

  1. Even with the Mac version in my possession, I will still be purchasing Scrivener for Windows.
  2. When someone tells you that something is coming, I will consider believing them.

Quirky Isn’t The Word

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Plenty of people claim that their technology is a little “weird”, that they have to give their machines a bit of a kick before they’ll actually do anything. But I think I’m a winner when it comes to oddities about the tech I rely on to produce…well, anything, really.

A few years ago, I decided that a PC wasn’t doing what I wanted. I actually suspect (and blame) Scrivener had a large part of my decision to finally invest in a Mac. Plus one of my student friends had a Mac, and it was an all-singing, all-dancing, display of everything I ever wanted and would ever want out of a computer.

I took the plunge and bought my MacBook, installed Scrivener and sat there, gloated, for weeks at how amazing everything was on it. I could make web sites on it! Never mind that I could already make web sites on my PC, shush, this was something else. I could do everything I wanted to do on my PC, and it was just so much prettier!

About two, maybe three months into the honeymoon period of said MacBook, I started to get my first problems. When I booted it, occasionally I would get a folder with a question mark in it. This is supposed to be a very bad thing within the Apple Circle. Basically, it’s like something’s wrong with your brain, that kind of serious. Sometimes it worked, other times it didn’t. That was about it. So after a little while, I sent it to the Authorised Apple Repair Center, where they fitted it with a shiny new hard drive. I lost a few chapters of Divided They Fall I was working on at that point, but it wasn’t the end of the world. And everything was great again. For a bit.

You would think that at this point, having seen how unstable a platform this machine was, I would have taken precautions and set up some kind of (or any) backup routine.

I didn’t.

I continued happily for a while, until eventually, about 18 months ago, I started to get another problem with my MacBook, which I now call the “Confused Restart”. Basically, whenever I booted up, it would get to a point and then tell me it needed restarting. In the beginning, it would do it about 3 times then come on. I learned all kinds of useless stuff about Macs at this point, the fact that you could reset your RAM by hitting a key combination the main hallejulia at this point, since it seemed to work.

In any case, it came to a point where it wouldn’t boot at all from the drive, and I had to take it back to the repair centre (out of warranty, this time), only to find that their official diagnosis was “we don’t know what the hell’s up with it”.

They replaced the hard drive again. I lost a large amount of Divided They Fall this time. I whined a lot about this at the time, but of course looking back it’s only a reminder to how important backups actually are, so in hindsight, it was still my fault.

You cannot rely on technology to do anything on your behalf. You have to have something set in place for if when something goes wrong.

In any case, the repair centre charged me close to £100 to “repair” the MacBook. Within a month, the problems were back, and me–being a pussy–didn’t take it back demanding that they look at it again without charging me.

So I abandonded the MacBook and looked into eBaying it. I also bought a MacMini ( I still wanted–and by this point was quite addicted to–Scrivener). Then, one evening, I was going through my boot up routine (consisted of boot up, restart, restart, restart, RAM reset, retart, restart, boot), when the cat, Neo, decided it would be fun to sit on the MacBook. By this point of course, I had learned the importance of backups and invested however much it was at the time for a USB hard drive, so I didn’t care of whether or not the cat (wet from the night out chasing field mice or whatever) sat on it.

To my surprise, the MacBook came on the first time, with the cat sat grooming itself with its furry backside rooted on the keys. After pushing Neo straight off, I turned the machine off and tried it again.

Same message, “You need to restart your computer”.

I rested my arm on the keys and rebooted.

It came on, starting with its usual chirpy “I’m alive” note and starting into the operating system.

I was practically crying at this point, I’m sure.

So now, I have to start my MacBook (the machine that, through it all, is still my machine of choice when it comes to anything writing or anything vaguely resembling writing) by leaning on it.

Yes, quirky isn’t the word.

Oh, and PROGRESS! Yes I’m not just babbling on about my lack of technological prowess.

2010 02 28 Scrivener Progress

This is what I have stopped doing in order to waffle about my writing tools.

I’ll get back to it now.

Playing with Software: OmmWriter

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I’m still trying to find that perfect writer’s software. Scrivener is doing pretty well for the majority of things writing, if not everything, but being a terrible procrastinator as well as a complete pushover when it comes to anything shiny, I still want to try new things.

The last thing I tried and tested was Write or Die, which I used for NaNo, where it was important to get as many words as you could possibly spew out in the shortest amount of time. And it worked for that, and worked well. I never realised how much time I actually just staring at my screen until I used this, where every 30 or seconds, WoD started to beep at me because I wasn’t typing anything.

OmmWriter, Mac-based writing software, is pretty much the exact opposite of Write or Die. The idea of OmmWriter according to its web site is to restore the bond between writer and his/her tools, to make you enjoy the very process of writing, instead of just writing to reach your goal.

While it is in essence just notepad with a background and some music/sounds, you really do get a sense of stillness, of oneness between you, the writer, and your work while you are using it.

If you get the feeling you are losing touch with your writing, I’d suggest giving OmmWriter a go.

OmmWriter Site

Get Back in Your Cage! Don’t Make Me Get BlockWriter!

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I am referring to my internal editor, who has already made herself very outspoken about the drivel I’ve churned out my attempt for NaNoWriMo so far. This early in the month, I shouldn’t be having these kind of feelings. But alas, she’s here already, tutting and pointing, mumbling the likes of: ‘You could move that sentence over there, delete that bit there, who cares about that bit?’.
I’ve done well so far, well-set in the mentality that I have to just write forward. I shouldn’t be re-reading really anything that I’ve written already; all I’ll want to do is reword, replace or remove it. And I know that. It’s only a draft. Even if it’s shabbier than a tramps underpants, once I’ve it written down, at least I have something to work on. And besides, 9/10 times I come back to what I’ve done a few days/weeks later and think ‘actually, it’s not that bad’.
So anyway, I’ve been looking for something that will help keep me in this forward mindset, and there’s a few things that have…well, without sounding too much like a cheesy advert…have enhanced my entire writing experience.
First off, there’s good ol’ Scrivener for the Mac, which I can’t praise enough, and have done regularly. It’s an amazing piece of software, which does pretty much everything I need to keep whatever I’m working on. It’s like doing it the old fashioned way; you put your scraps, your hand-written (scanned in, obviously; it’s not that clever), photos, videos, clippings and every other random bit of whatever that I’ve come across, and it stores it in a single file, which–suitably enough–is called a the Binder. It uses index cards to sort out each of your scenes, making it stupidly easy to rearrange bits that are fitted elsewhere.

The index cards are not locked to anything–you can move them around within the binder as suits your story.

There’s so much more to it, as well (without going into too much of I “I Heart Scrivener” campaign or anything). It’s all just so…jazzy. It was enough to make me buy TWO Macs just for this software.
So, yes, Scrivener is amazing. I worship KB (the creator) and the ground he walks on. But there is still something missing. For all its bells and whistles, I still get that nagging little voice in the back of my head telling me to go back and change something. It helps that everything is cut into scenes, as I can only see what I’ve literally just written, but I do still fall prey of the paragraph-by-paragraph edit.
That’s where these tiiiiiiiiiny little free applications comes into play. BlockWriter was actually a piece of concept software dreamt up in the mind of Khoi Vinh, whereby your machine literally becomes like a typewriter. So you have a document, like in any text editors, but here’s the thing. You can only type forward. Attempting to go back in the document just messes up the rest of your work.

What I’m doing for now is writing in BlockWriter, and when I’m done, copy/pasting it into Scrivener. That way, I’m getting the best of both worlds. There are a few drawbacks to the software, such as how it won’t save in simple TXT format and instead chooses to save them in RTF and only allows it with some silly shadow effect on it, but whatever. Minor niggles that don’t compare the ability to shove internal editor back in her cage and start poking her with a stick.

It works for me, at least.

Now, I have had BlockWriter for quite a while. I had it back before I started having all my problems on the MacBook, which is a good 12 months ago now. Thing is, I can’t exactly remember where I got it from. I suspect KB or someone else on LiteratureandLatte might have given mocking the software up a go. Either way, the long and short of it is that I can’t find a link to it. But, since it’s ridiculously tiny, I’ve put it up on my own site: Download BlockWriter (ZIP Format) So if anyone wants it…there you go. (This one will ONLY WORK ON A MAC. Read on if you’re using Windows.)
Also, there is now a version for Windows. Funnily enough, the guy who’s made BlockWriter for Windows was also tempted into buying a Mac for the fact that it had this software, only later to discover that it was indeed only concept software. So what did he do? Made it himself, of course!
Since I hadn’t seen this version up to this point, so I thought I’d give it a try. Basically, what you have in this version is WriteRoom for the Mac, but without the backspace button. See what I’ve tried to write up here:


As frustrating as it can be, it still propels you forward in the writing front, which has got to be worth something. More than that, the software is actually available for free, which you can find here: Download (.exe file) More Info
So anyway, that’s what I’m trying to beat my inner editor down with. Has it worked so far? Well I’m pushing over the 2k mark for Vampire’s Son on day 1, so here’s hoping! It’s early days yet, and only time will tell.