As you know one of my implicit and poetic New Year’s resolutions was to get serious about writing… practice the art, improve my abilities and create. It’s a multi-front undertaking about blogging, school, journalling and because I am a ridiculously enthusiastic individual, it is also about writing a great Canadian novel.
The subject of the novel is super secret but it’s starting out as a piece of creative non-fiction, which means research, organization, time-lining, outlining and other structural undertakings. I like this as it plays to my professional background – a project manager. However it quickly starts to get messy in a regular word processor. You quickly arrive in a situation where you have multiple word documents such as an outline and a draft that need to be kept up to date separately, not to mention the meshed network of file folders for research, notes, drafts and other related files. So this got me thinking, there must be an app for this… and sure enough courtesy of Apple’s OS X App store I found Scrivener, and it is perfectly tailored for the job. The price tag was a little disconcerting at first at $44.99 so I headed over to the developers website to see if they had a demo and they did…
After installing the demo and reviewing some instructional material including a very helpful video, I started importing over all of my miscellaneous files into the Scrivener app. That done I felt at home in my very well organized virtual writing studio, so I purchased a version through the app store, and I’m happy to report that the upgrade from the demo to the app through Apple was seamless. My work was not disrupted, my files were not corrupted. Since then I’ve even penned the first page of my opus.
Watch out world! Mr Campbell and his partner Dr. Scrivener are on the case.
Exploring-Art 
Hi Mac,
Sounds interesting. I would appreciate a demo sometime.
I had an idea about writing fiction that I thought might be of interest to you. The idea is to include effects of non-fiction works on the fictional characters. The idea came when I was reading a Nero Wolfe novel and Wolfe was described reading Robert Ardry’s 1961 work, African Genesis. Not much was mentioned about the book other than its use in some play on words but that book in fact was seminal as it was perhaps the first to champion the idea that all modern humans in the world today have a common origin in Africa only a relatively short time ago. Wolfe could have been portrayed as stimulated by the idea and pondering on topics of some interest such as human brotherhood.
Another example is that when I was a young boy I remember my father excitedly describing the discovery of DNA as revealed by Watson and Crick. From that time on I have taken our deep relationship to the natural world as self evident.
I know you have had similar experiences with non-fiction you have read and might be well suited to create a vivid description of this experience in your writing.
Cheers
Jock