I’m a professional writer, and before that a journalist (writing for the Sunday Times in the UK on technology - would happily have plugged Scrivener if it had been around then).
My next book out in the US is The Seventh Sacrament from Bantam Dell, the fifth in a crime series set in Rome. It was started in Mellel and finished in Word. The one after that (out January in the UK from Macmillan) was written in Pages. The one after that (which will be out in the UK and US in 2009) is being completed in Scrivener after being started in Word.
I particularly like the way Scrivener can be used to handle multiple viewpoint narratives - much better than anything else - and the ease with which you can focus on chapter and scenes, without feeling they’re somehow detached from the rest of the script, which is what happened for me in something like Ulysses.
Anyway - congratulations on a ground-breaking and genuinely innovative product out there. I’ve tried everything there is just about and for me this is undoubtedly the best.
Ha! I wondered what had happened to you David. I used to make a bee-line to your contributions in the Sunday Times. The technology pages haven’t been quite the same since you moved on.
Enough buttering-up! What do you make of NoteMind (http://www.synium.de/notemind/index.html) from more extended use? (I read the “early-days” review in your blog.) On price alone, if nothing else, it looks attractive as a writer’s datastore.
P.S. Good luck with the launch of The Seventh Sacrament in the US.
Notemind was great for the latest project which is just coming to a close. But that did involve a phenomenal amount of stored research material. Every book is different for me. I’m not sure whether the next will have so much data. I suspect a lot of material could be simply contained in folders in Scrivener. Will have to see how things go.
Thanks for the good wishes… am just packing for the start of the summer’s travels (and believe me promotion is not the holiday people think it is!)
Hello David - and thanks for the compliments about Scrivener. I, too, used to read your articles in the Technology section of the Times, and miss them. I also followed your blog, and some of your opinions about software there were actually formative in the development of Scrivener. Because of that, I always meant to send you a free copy for evaluation, in fact, but after I read why you gave up on Mellel (lack of widows and orphans etc), I thought that Scrivener might not fit the bill for you. I’m genuinely rather chuffed that it does!
Well I’m flattered to think I may have contributed in some small way to such a great product, Keith. Thanks a lot. If you want any kind of formal plaudit for Scrivener just drop me a line through the contact form on my website or let me have some direct email address some other way. It’s a shame the Sunday Times dropped its lively, questioning coverage of the tech world but I still feel privileged to have been there during the good times.
Mellel’s widow and orphans problems have been solved since I wrote that. When I get to dumping out my latest book from Scrivener I will try putting that through Mellel and then sending on the Word file to my publishers (they will expect a .doc file). I’m also the board member responsible for the International Thrillerwriters website (thrillerwriters.org) and I intend to write something there about Scrivener before long. It’s a really interesting product because it makes you (or me anyway) think about story structure.
And thanks for thinking of a free copy but I have always paid for software I use in real life and always will (unless, in the past, it came from Microsoft, but I don’t touch that much any more).
PS. If my occasional ramblings in the blog actually did help shape Scrivener maybe I ought to blog more… I always thought no-one was reading!
What do you make of NoteMind (