It’s finally here! THE MONSTER NOVEL STRUCTURE WORKBOOK is available for pre-order, releasing on September 15, 2018! Beta readers agree, this book will change the way you novel. “I feel like I’ve won the novel-writing lottery! For the first time I feel like I have the tools and knowledge to do this thing; to actually see my novels to completion. …
Aeon Timeline 2: Tracking Frequency in the Relationship View Matrix
I’ve used all kinds of tools to track things across the length of a manuscript. I’ve used giant pieces of paper, spreadsheets, and meta-data. But I think I’m in love with this one: Aeon Timeline 2. First, let me explain what I’m tracking and why. I have a bunch of characters in my WIP, and I want to make sure …
How to Process an Edit Letter (with spreadsheets)
At some point in your writing career you’re going to be given an edit letter. Edit letters are what a publisher, editor, agent, or even a critique partner or beta reader, give you in addition to any notes they’ve made on the manuscript itself. It’s the prose where this person lays out the things they think are or aren’t working …
Trigger Warnings, Big Data, and Building a Better Search Engine
There’s a lot of discussion these days about trigger warnings and how they should be handled. I don’t have any triggers, but I know some wonderful people who do. (Just like racism and homophobia, being a jerk can be cured by getting to know people.) I have a thought. A theory. A proposal, if you will. It’s about using technology to …
Scrivener and Story Genius
It’s well established that Scrivener is a great tool for writers. You might not be aware of how well it integrates with other writing tools and systems. For this, there are Scrivener templates. A template is a collection of Binder items that are arranged and pre-filled with content to help you on your way. I’ve downloaded many templates over the …
Twitter Chats for 5 Different Writers, a diyMFA Guest Post
I’ve got another guest post on diyMFA! This week it’s about Twitter chats. #5onFri: Twitter Chats for 5 Different Writers Writing hashtags are hot right now. There are plenty of pages explaining them and what to look for, but who are these chats for? Here are five kinds of writers and the benefits they can gain from participating in a …
Backstory Hunting: Isolate and Count Highlighted Words in MS Word
I recently went on a hunt for unnecessary backstory in my first 50 pages. Early backstory slows the pace right as readers are looking to dig into your story, not get bogged down with what already happened. Thanks to Margie Lawson and her EDITS system, I appreciate the importance of highlighting. And sure, you can highlight on paper, or you …
Scrivener – Changing Index Card Summary Text Size
This has been driving me crazy for months: how do you change the size of text in Scrivener’s Inspector? Today, Celal Öney provided the answer. He calls himself a Scrivener Expert, and he really does know his stuff. Control over the Inspector Turns out, the part that looks like an index card is still considered part of the Corkboard, even when …
#NaNoPrep: The Pacemaker
While checking out the competition browsing our neighbor regions I came across a link to The Pacemaker. It’s a super nifty little words-per-day calculator. Set your target word total, designate when you’ll be most and least productive, and voila! For a while now I’ve been interested in trying ‘reverse NaNo’, as its been dubbed. That means starting with high output, …
Scrivener Image Cards
Scrivener does a lot of nifty things. I think most people are aware by now that it has a cork board/index card function. Each text file has an accompanying information card, where you can put things like a description of what the file contains. These cards can then be displayed en mass and drag-and-dropped to reorder them. This is, as …
Scrivener Color Coding Pt. 2: Icons
In Part One of this mini-series I shared how I use Label colors to show progress of my documents. This worked really well for me during UNCHURCHED, which is a single POV. My trouble began when I started work on GISELLE, which has two POVs. Sure, I could use my original color coding method to track who was speaking, but …
Scrivener Color Coding Pt. 1: Labels
A few months back, I shared this tweet: Trying a new approach to revising in @ScrivenerApp #amwriting #amrevising #amgettingdesperate pic.twitter.com/imd6SxggvZ — Bronwen Fleetwood (@bronniesway) April 13, 2015 It was retweeted by @Scrivener and is my most successful post, proving that funny sells almost as well as sex. For the uninitiated, Scrivener is software designed specifically for managing large writing projects, …
Solution: Scrivener files won’t open
I had a wee heart attack earlier this week when my Scrivener project wouldn’t open on my laptop. I bounce between a Mac at work and a PC at home, using Dropbox to keep them synched, and up to now I hadn’t had much of a problem doing so. I was having trouble Googling for a solution, so now that …