Scrivener, the Final Installment

I realized that I've left my audience hanging about my writing tools. Sorry. Yes, I am still writing. I am 47,000 words into Ms. Glimmer and the Do-nothing Prince—written exclusively on Scrivener.

Yeah, I broke down and bought Scrivener for all my platforms. A helpful user on the Literature & Latte forums explained how I can create a snapshot from the conflict document Scrivener creates when it flags a chapter as out of sync. By doing this simple copy and paste, I can easily see what changed in the original and conflict document using the built in comparator.

Whilst no word processor will ever be perfect in all aspects, I am very satisfied with Scrivener. I'm using built-in features to keep track of characters sketches, images, and research as if I were writing long hand into binder with paper and folders. Except it is all electronic. For long form writing, it's pretty slick.

So long as I carefully close the app on each platform, I don't get sync errors. The few I've gotten since I last blogged demonstrated no actual textual differences and were probably only metadata. Understanding how the process works makes me feel confident, unlike when I worked recently with Keynote (which is Apple's Powerpoint where Pages is Apple's Word). I needed to write a presentation. I worked on my Mac, but I tried to do some rehearsal and proofing through iCloud on my iPad. You guessed it. Sync issues. The iPad uploaded the heavily edited presentation, which succeeded, but the Mac refused to download it. Instead, it showed a cloud symbol next to the name in Finder. I had iCloud connectivity. iCloud acknowledged it had a file to download, but it refused to do so. Why Apple doesn't provide a request download now menu item, I'll never know. I eventually had to reboot the Mac to convince iCloud to download.

In any case, I'm writing (or procrastinating because I'm writing this rather than the story).