“I’ve been waiting for this moment for all my life, hold on” - Phil Collins
Yes, I just quoted a Phil Collins song. Got a problem with that?
From the moment I discovered that the fine L&L team was working on a version for Windows, I was oh so very happy. I had run across Scrivener almost two years ago when I had heard of it through the NaNoWriMo website. After looking over the features I had somehow not realized right away (my eyes, they play tricks on me!) that it was only for Mac until I went to try to download it. When I had gone through the features I had told myself, “This is it. This is what I’ve been looking for!” – you see, Microsoft Word wasn’t enough anymore. I realized it was harder to write a full length novel without being able to divide it up into scenes that were easily accessible (yes, I do know some ways around this, but who wants multiple Word files on their computer called “Scene 1”, and “Scene 45”.
So when I discovered Scrivener was only for Mac I wept, and cursed Mac users everywhere (for that, I am sorry. I really do love you guys, I swear!). I found yWriter5 before starting my NaNo novel in 2009, and it worked just fine. It was simplistic, a bit too simplistic for my taste, but it had the most needed aspects that I needed and I won that year. I was satisfied…for a while. I kept hearing about Scrivener from other websites, and wondered why I hadn’t come across Scrivener much sooner in my Internet surfing, novel writing days (Shoot, I’d have probably invested in a Mac sooner had I known!). So imagine my belief when I saw the news of Scrivener coming out for Windows.
I think my husband thought I’d gone insane.
So I camped out on the site on October 24th (is that even possible? Virtual camp out?), and refreshed hourly on the 25th. When I finally was torn away from the Internet to attempt being a wife and mother instead of a fangirl waiting to catch a glimpse of Phil Collins (PHIIIIIL! OMG I LOVE YOOOU!), the Beta was released. In my haste I kept looking in the wrong area to download it, and got frustrated, but finally I found it. Once downloaded I promptly ran around my husband several times while saying, “SCRIVENER! SCRIVENER! BETA! BETA! OMG!” and he asked me to lay off of the caffeine for a while. I was like a kid at Christmas!
Oh right, my first impressions? Well, I have an older, much abused laptop. I thought maybe it was simply running slow due to my poor laptop not being able to handle it, but then I discovered that it was the same for others. I was happy to hear that because I knew it would be easily fixed by later updates, which it was. It also fixed some of those capitalization errors, though it still doesn’t register “doesn’t” or “don’t”, etc. Simple errors, ones I can work with. I wasn’t fazed by it. I took to heart that, as a Beta, it would have plenty of issues – including crashes, and other nasty bugs. I saved and backed up anything I had written whenever I took a break to look over what I had written. Thank God I had, because on Oct. 28th I experienced a major uh-oh. I had backed up my work, and gone to take a break, only to come back and reopen to half of what I had written erased – completely gone. Had I saved it beforehand? Yes. Backed up? Yes. It took a while, but in the end I only lost two sentences that were easily replaced. This gave me a momentary heart attack, but I survived. I’m pretty sure I have nine lives like a cat, or maybe our four cats are putting together all of their nine lives just to keep me from dying. Who knows? I love those cats.
With NaNoWriMo approaching I have a sense of anxiety, though. Should I continue using Scrivener as my main writing program, or go back to writing my actual novel on yWriter until Scrivener is released? On the one hand, I don’t want to have a major screw-up happen that ends up erasing half of my novel, but on the other hand I don’t think I could go back to another writing program and feel the same again like I do with Scrivener. All I do know is that, once released, I will be a Scrivehead (Scrivenerer?) for life.
*This post is not really “Phil Collins Approved”.