And now how to get Storyist wordcounts into Jamie Rubin’s google scripts

Just a quick note while I slug away at revisions (Which, by the way, means my word counts suck, no matter how much I write, on account of all my deletes. Go figure.). Because of the pending move, and the fact that the good folks over at Scrivener have announced that it’s going to be –  yep – another two months while they track down internal bugs, I decided to dust off my copy Storyist and port the novel into it.

And by port, I mean deal with the fact that despite claiming to support Scrivener files, Storyist does a real lousy job of importing them in a usable format. You can see them, edit them, etc., but they aren’t considered manuscripts. It’s almost like they’re competitors or something.

However, Storyist, for all its faults, does have a rock solid integration with its iOS app. And with me looking at spending a day on a plane, I’d rather lug around an iPad than a laptop (cramped seats, big guy, it doesn’t take a math genius to know that tray table isn’t coming down all the way, which means that laptop has nowhere to rest). But using Storyist, with it’s Yet Another File Formatting, means I don’t have an easy way of updating my wordcounts via the @jamietr scripts.

So, I fixed that. It’s not much of a shell script – we don’t have to make any changes to how Storyist synchronizes, we just need to extract a file, clean it, and copy it over to Google. Jamie’s scripts pick it up and run with it, and all is happy (minus my note about too much text in one file, but that’s true no matter where your text comes from).

Storyist to Google (Mac)