I have been eyeball deep in a rewrite for the last couple months. It’s taking me so long to get through it for multiple reasons, one among them being that sometimes I’l too tired by the end of the day to think of anything decent to add. My goal was to take the super raw first draft I did, beef up the story, and fix the major flaws with a goal of upping the content by about 20 000 words. It was a slim story so the words are needed.

But adding words, and in some cases chapters, has made the whole thing an absolute mess. This is where I can reaffirm my love of Scriviner.

Originally I wrote the novel in word, with each chapter being a separate file that I would later copy and paste compile.When I approached the rewrite I imported them all into Scrivener and just expected to add to each chapter as I went. Except soon they were getting too big and had to be split, or I understood that there needed to be a whole new chapter for the idea from the get go. Old chapters were being dumped into a folder dedicated to them while the new chapters were being built up, some snippets stolen from the originals. I have index cards laid out for what needs to happen in the next 9 chapters, ready for me to turn them into text pieces when the time comes. Really, the whole thing looks horrible if I look at the binder portion because the first chapter listed in the old folder is 7, and I’m currently working on Chapter 11.

Messy, messy, messy!

But that’s the thing I’m really loving about scrivener, is that I can make a complete and total mess of the whole thing and yet it still makes sense. I’m not losing any information as I go, nor am I confusing myself with the additions. I’m able to separate the important parts from the old parts and set them aside.

It’s kinda fantastic.

While I’m still, all this time later, learning Scrivener as I do my rewrites I’m very happy with the software. As was before I will be posting more as I get to learn the software, but my experiences with it have been great.

Now, back to writing. If I’m going to do camp NaNoWriMo with book three then I better finish book two very soon.