I switch back and forth. I love composition notebooks because they're very portable and no spiral wires to get tangled on things. I always use pens. I can't stand to use pencils unless I'm drawing. One of the benefits of writing it on paper first is when I type it up I'm already editing as I go.
I don't really put much thought into it. I just write. For organizational purposes, I simply create a folder for the project and then create a separate word document for each chapter, naming them: Chapter One, Chapter two etc... Makes it easier to go back to previous chapters to work with them. If I have any pictures, maps, notes or links to web sites that I've collected doing research, I just throw them in the main folder. If I have a name for the book or the project, thats what I name the main folder. I just store it on my desktop. In addition... I carry a small notebook and a space pen everywhere I go just in case I get an idea or hear something that needs to be jotted down.
I just want to thank everyone for all the helpful replies and suggestions. When I created this topic, I also created it on another forum to get as many replies as possible. I have just replied there and thought of sharing it here as well The summary of my reply is: The current status of my project, new realizations, tips & tricks (probably from this forum as well): (Source: http://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1337550 ) Sorry for such a late reply. I would love to share some of my ideas but the problem is that my project seems so vast at the moment that I don't know where to begin, when telling others about it. There are so many layers/aspects in my project, that I still need to sort and organize, that it can take me long time to explain what my series is all about. That is because I have lots of "what if-ideas", ideas for alternative scenes, many unanswered questions, etc. A sea of variables that I need to transmute into constants. I need to go through my ideas, keep those that I still like, throw away the ideas that don't seem right (or at least store them in a seperate file), narrow it all down and start keeping it simple. ********************************* I am trying to figure out whether I should reuse the "SERIES BIBLE DEVELOPMENT GUIDE" ideas and stick to MS Word or actually start using Celtx. But I think I will stick to Word. Someone suggested that I stop worrying too much about which software to use and simply use MS Word by seperating different aspects of my series into individual *.doc files. That is my dilemma - when I start fiddling with several files it also becomes sort of a mess, but if I only stick to one big file then, as you see, you end up with lots of scrolling if you want to get an overview of your ideas. *************************************** I was also looking into Outline feature in Word and how to get the most out of it when trying to keep a large project organized. The concept works this way. You make Headings and Sub-Headings. For instance the Heading is "Characters" and Sub-Headings are different characters "Character 1", "Character 2", etc. Then you activate Outline view (at the bottom menu - left to the zoom in/out scroller). Now, as you see, you can expand and collapse different Headings and Sub-Headings - expand, if you want to view their content and collapse if you only want to see the Headings and move them around. The reason, I think, the Outline feature is so nice is because the manual copy pasting is risky. Sometimes you find some text you want to cut and paste elsewhere. You select the text, cut it, spend some time finding the place where you want to paste it, but suddenly you stumble upon some awesome idea and forget that you still have some text in your clipboard (in computer memory). Then you copy or cut another piece of text and your previous piece of text is now lost. I am still experimenting with tips and tricks regarding organization of lots of ideas. All of you are still welcome to contribute and share your serendipities
Word 2013 works magic to me. I know there aren't alot of people who get excited by the 'Windows 8 look' (or Metro User Interface as it is called), but when it comes to the 2013 office, I do find it works very, very nicely. They have a very slight delay between you pressing a key and the letter fading in onto the screen, I can hardly describe it but to me it feels much nicer and much more natural than any other text editor where the letters instantly pop up after you've hit a key. This may sound like I am drooling over a texteditor and quite frankly, I am. Having used Word 2003 and 2007 in between, I find that 2013 is the very best Word yet, it really does make typing much, much more enjoyable as letters seem to 'flow' from your keyboard, onto the screen. Just try it .
I also really like Word 2013. I have a touch screen laptop though, and it really makes a big difference for ease of use. And yeah, the cursor just kind of glides along smoothly. It makes every other word processor seem choppy and archaic.
Might I add that I am a HUGE Scrivener fanboy. The 2011 ports for both Word and Excel to Mac are atrocious, gigantic, inelegant and take forever to load and save.
Look what I found: http://writersdrift.co.uk/2012/03/01/scrivener-series-development-bible-free-download/
I am not going to defend Micro$hit much, but when it comes to office, they know what they are doing. As far as slow loading is concerned, well, that is obviously a result of their rivalry with apple. iTunes is a huge, massive, ginormous pain in the *** for any Windows machine. It's slow, buggy and just generally crap. I'll pipe in one more good word (word, get it?) for Microsoft: Excel is one of the most complicated consumer computer programs ever written. I am not joking, Excel is really, really complex, and that is coming from a soon to be famous (or not) computer programmer, me.
You're not wrong here. I've run iTunes side by side on my Mac next to a PC when my friend made the same claim about iTunes. It was like night and day. The ported version of iTunes of was like iTunes' rather sad cousin who had suffered some brain trauma at birth. My friend was stupefied by how quicksilver smooth it was on my machine, the Mac. I don't like getting into platform v. platform discussions because they have an amazing tendency to devolve into stone throwing with stunning speed, but if one is a Mac aficionado, as I am, we feel about Word and Excel the way you feel about iTunes on your PC.
