Merlin Parnassus Third Edition
When you publish a novel, you always believe it is as good as it can be, and you consider it to be finished. Then some new tools come onto the market. I started with the application ‘ProWritingAid’ and used it for the second edition of the novel. However, it was a fight.
I use Microsoft Word for my story development and create new styles for each new format; so, if I don’t like a presentation then I can correct it quickly by adjusting its style.
Unfortunately, it took me a long time to find out that ‘ProWritingAid’ and ‘MSWord’ are not truly compatible. ProWritingAid seems to be USA only. You can set MSWord to English(UK) to control grammar and spelling but this is a global setting and it seems to revert to English(USA) at the drop of a hat. I suspect software upgrades are resetting defaults.
With this frustrating scenario, I was always on the lookout for something better and I am now using ‘Grammarly’. This product allows for language selection ‘English(British)’. Most suggestions, by the Grammarly application, for alternative phrases have been very good, often with several alternatives, but, in the end, you can still ignore the suggestions. On its performance to date, May 2019, I would recommend Grammarly as an excellent grammar checker, but the current version is losing paragraph styles; on balance this is a small nuisance that is easily corrected.
In March2019, I discovered an application called ‘Fictionary’. This product is claimed to be the first phase of Editing. It soon became clear that my concept of a ‘scene’ was not tight enough. Fictionary defines ‘a scene change’ as a change of Point of View (POV), location or time. The end of each scene should be marked by a line of three asterisks ‘***’, unless it was the end of the chapter.
Now my stories tend to be from a single POV and I hadn’t recognised time as a ‘change of scene’ condition, so I had to update the manuscript before loading it to Fictionary. Now each scene requires a POV, the POV’s objective, the scene name and location. It is now clear to me that this rigid form would be required everywhere – film, TV or theatre. This is a valuable lesson on its own. So, the package had succeeded from the very first step.
With the manuscript loaded, and the scenes recognised, the hard work begins. My novel ‘Merlin Parnassus’ was 65,000 words when I started this exercise. The last chapter was rewritten as four new chapters. The novel is now up to 70,000 words and I haven’t finished the Fictionary evaluation, and the novel. It looks like the Fictionary phase will take 2 months; this is a significant amount of effort and I have yet to judge if it was worth it.
Peter Rendell
Merlin Parnassus
I use Microsoft Word for my story development and create new styles for each new format; so, if I don’t like a presentation then I can correct it quickly by adjusting its style.
Unfortunately, it took me a long time to find out that ‘ProWritingAid’ and ‘MSWord’ are not truly compatible. ProWritingAid seems to be USA only. You can set MSWord to English(UK) to control grammar and spelling but this is a global setting and it seems to revert to English(USA) at the drop of a hat. I suspect software upgrades are resetting defaults.
With this frustrating scenario, I was always on the lookout for something better and I am now using ‘Grammarly’. This product allows for language selection ‘English(British)’. Most suggestions, by the Grammarly application, for alternative phrases have been very good, often with several alternatives, but, in the end, you can still ignore the suggestions. On its performance to date, May 2019, I would recommend Grammarly as an excellent grammar checker, but the current version is losing paragraph styles; on balance this is a small nuisance that is easily corrected.
In March2019, I discovered an application called ‘Fictionary’. This product is claimed to be the first phase of Editing. It soon became clear that my concept of a ‘scene’ was not tight enough. Fictionary defines ‘a scene change’ as a change of Point of View (POV), location or time. The end of each scene should be marked by a line of three asterisks ‘***’, unless it was the end of the chapter.
Now my stories tend to be from a single POV and I hadn’t recognised time as a ‘change of scene’ condition, so I had to update the manuscript before loading it to Fictionary. Now each scene requires a POV, the POV’s objective, the scene name and location. It is now clear to me that this rigid form would be required everywhere – film, TV or theatre. This is a valuable lesson on its own. So, the package had succeeded from the very first step.
With the manuscript loaded, and the scenes recognised, the hard work begins. My novel ‘Merlin Parnassus’ was 65,000 words when I started this exercise. The last chapter was rewritten as four new chapters. The novel is now up to 70,000 words and I haven’t finished the Fictionary evaluation, and the novel. It looks like the Fictionary phase will take 2 months; this is a significant amount of effort and I have yet to judge if it was worth it.
Peter Rendell
Merlin Parnassus
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