Yesterday, words were written, and it was a glorious thing. 1400+ of them, to be specific. There I (well, my lead character atm) was, standing on the rocky, mottled surface of Io, approaching the ridge of an impact crater, watching the languid flow of lava as tectonic forces overcame the confines of gravity to shoot lava into the yellow haze of a sky with Jupiter ascendant, and the next thing you know a thirty foot tall alien robot was freeing itself from the crater walls and making its way down.
It. Was. Awesome.
What was the secret? Giving up. More specifically, giving up on the tools and fancy shmancy apps I’d been using. Don’t get me wrong – scrivener? Love it. But at least until they release the iPad app, it’s not really a portable, multiple locale use program, and that’s a real hinderance to someone who might be trying to work in multiple locations as time allowed. I’ve tried all of the current work arounds – indexcards (even as an app, ick), sync with external folder as plain text (my sensitive nature is put off by the convoluted structure that all of my planning is turned into when rendered as flat text), and of course a dozen different apps to read those syncs. Meh. They all suck, in my opinion, because they break the cohesiveness of the writing IDE that scrivener is on the desktop.
So yesterday, I didn’t do any of that crap. Saturday night I grabbed a copy of focuswriter, then spent an inordinate amount of time playing with themes in full screen (my favorites were over here, especially the Blade Runner and Halcyon based themes). Using a plain text file saved on dropbox, I was able to seamlessly work between my desktop, iPad, and even my work laptop between work tasks. That meant I could focus more on the words, which is what it’s all about, right?
N.B. – there is, in my opinion, a “bug” with focuswriter, at least when used with dropbox, which causes autosave to be useless, and manual save to invoke a dialogue of “something else has touched this file, ignore or reload?” If you try this out – IGNORE. Reload will cause you to lose everything you wrote since your last successful save. Like that witty paragraph and a half that I will never be able to recover because my brain will never again be so suave.
Related articles
- A Good Word Processor for Writers Should Do 3 Things Really Well (jamierubin.net)
- How To Sync Your iPad With Scrivener (michaeljholley.com)
- [writing|process] On writing and finishing a story (jlake.com)
