Scrivener

I learned about the software called Scrivener through Joanna Penn (www.jfpenn.com & www.TheCreativePenn.com).  Many, many thanks.

It is like a complete author’s studio, bringing together many functions and activities in one user interface.  It’s only been about a month, but it has made the process of writing so much easier and much more productive.

So far my favorite features are:

1. Everything from the manuscript to research  & notes in one place, appropriately called a Project “Binder,” including text, images, pdfs
2. Corkboard with Index cards to help visualize and organize plotting, characters & locations
3. Ability to save web pages as pdf files directly into the Research part of the project binder simply by pasting the URL
4. Project Target window to track and display both total manuscript word count & session word count in real time
5. Ability to output manuscript directly to epub file format to read on my iPad

Before I started, I did the 2-hour tutorial and it was invaluable to getting started.  Importing my existing projects was pretty straightforward and easy.

It is  definitely one of those “how did I get along without it” products.