I was home sick yesterday. Just a cold, but nasty and energy-sapping. Home with the kid, which was extra-tiring, but not as tiring as a full-on officebaby day would have been. I managed to do some work, though — writing up most of a step-by-step how-to for converting A Certain Magazine to epub. It’s a rather involved process. I’m up over 2,000 words, and I still need to add some screenshots. But it must be done. If nobody else knows how to do it, then I can never take a vacation again, and that wouldn’t be fun.
Some news! My story “The Carved Forest” will appear in Under My Hat, and anthology of YA witch stories edited by Jonathan Strahan. Very happy to be part of that project, and I think it’s one of the better stories I’ve written in recent years.
Charlie Jane Anders of io9 interviewed me about my forthcoming novel Briarpatch, so if you’re curious about the book, go see some of my blather about it. (The novel should be out in September, I think.)
“D is for De Gustibus” went up at Daily Science Fiction this week, latest in The Alphabet Quartet. Just think — 22 letters left to go! Such wonders await!
I revised my middle grade book last week, so my agent will be sending that off soon. Fly away, little manuscript; write home when you find work.
I downloaded the Scrivener beta for Windows, and I can see the appeal. My current project and my next one are both heavily outlined and require a lot of research notes, and I can see how Scrivener’s organizational capacities (both for text and for research materials) will be useful for them. So consider me a cautious convert, at least for some books. It violates my format-agnostic approach — that I can write novels with any tool, be it a computer, or a pen and a notebook, or a sufficiently thick stack of index cards and a sufficiently sharp crayon — but I’m not immune to the appeal of better living through technology.
Out of interest, Tim, what did you use to write/outline your previous work?
I tried Scrivener and yWriter but found them to be too restrictive after the ‘I can do whatever I want’ with MS Word.
I’m not much of an outliner, usually. I jot things down in a little notebook, or just type a few lines at the end of a Word document. Scrivener has some nice outline features, though, that are useful for a couple of projects I’m doing that require more advance planning than usual.
OK. Thank you for the reply. It’s always interesting to hear the way real writers do things.