Wow, that sounds dramatic.
Hopefully it isn’t as catastrophic as it appears to be. I finished a draft of my book Profitable Web Hosting last week, three full weeks before the due date. I’ve got the next one outlined on 3×5 cards (yes, really!). But they fell on the floor and got messed up. What’s a guy to do?
Well, I have had a free program for a while that allows you to input bits and pieces of text and rearrange them into something more coherent. But I just didn’t like the damned thing! So I went looking for another one.
I found a program called Scrivener, made by the folks over at Literature & Latte. They call it a “content-generation tool for writers.” I call it an “organizational word processor.” Tomato or bowling ball, whatever you want to call it I’m trying to learn how to use it. I think it might be useful for putting together my non-fic books. It can use the same 3×5 card motif I’m using in real life. Normally I start with those, then flip through them and write the accompanying text. With Scrivener, I’ll just input the messed-up cards, then rearrange them into the order I want, and then plug in the text.
A few years ago, I tried (well, played around with) writing a novel for NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writing Month. I haven’t written fiction seriously in years. This year, I’m thinking about trying to use Scrivener to resurrect the novel and get more done with it in November. I can just write scenes, or snippets – whatever, jump from this to that and it doesn’t matter. It’s all in one place. I can rearrange them when I’m done, then either edit the text in Scrivener or export it to another word processor.
But first – the next biz book! I’ll try to let you know how it’s going.