I’ve found that the best way to meet goals that I set for myself is to track them. That means that the goal must be measurable, and this years writing goals certainly meet that criteria: write 500 words of new fiction every day. I thought it might be of interest how I go about tracking…
Having successfully completed NaNoWriMo on a couple of occasions, I thought I’d provide a few tips that I found helpful during my efforts. Each time I completely NaNoWriMo, it was with the intention of writing at least 50,000 words of what would ultimately become a full novel. So these tips may not apply to folks…
I was once a new writer. I’m not so new anymore, but I can still remember those early days when I decided I wanted to be a science fiction writer. I had all kinds of ideas but when it came to sit down and write the story, I could always manage to find ways to…
My current story project is a complex one. It is the first of what I will hope to be a series of interconnected stories. The story is told from multiple viewpoints and in some cases the some of the character have no idea what the others are doing. It spans a period of about 60…
My posts on using Scrivener seem to be pretty popular and I’ve written enough of them to warrant collecting them all on a single page for easy access. To that end, I’ve created a Using Scrivener page. This page includes all of the posts that I’ve written on Scrivener, as well as a link to…
I’ve spent the last week working on an novelette, the first significant fiction-writing I’ve done using the Scrivener 2.1 update. I’ve gushed before about how much I love Scrivener as a writing tool, and the improvements in version 2.1 are well worth the upgrade. By night I write science fiction and by day I am…
Earlier in the week, I posted about how I created a custom short fiction template for Scrivener. A number of people asked me if I could make that template available for download and I have now done this. You can download the template here: ETA (11/15/2022): I did indeed once have a custom short fiction…
Anyone who uses Scrivener for fiction-writing will soon come to discover that all of its wonderful features are geared toward one primary goal: allow you, as the writer, to focus on writing without having to worry about formatting, layout or any of those other troublesome tasks. This simple idea is what sets Scrivener far apart…
I belong to a few writing critique groups and find them to be incredibly valuable. In fact, I’d wish I’d joined some of these groups before I sold a story. It might have taken me less than 14 years to make that first sale. On the chance that you’ve never been involved in a critique…
In part 1 of this series, I talked about my experience so far reading on the iPad. Today I want to discuss my experience writing on the device. Once again, my goal is to see how much of the work I do on a laptop can be transferred to the iPad. There is one exception…
Combining my quest for a paperless office at home with my writing goals this year has required some changes to old habits. It used to be that I would write the first draft of a story, print that story out, mark up the printout, and then begin working on the second draft. But I’m trying…
My evolution of story draft reading has come a long way in the last year. A year ago, I’d print out my first drafts, mark them up in red ink and then head into my second draft. Then I tried reading the draft within Scrivener and that worked pretty well, too, but it was a…