tools-and-technology

What happens to this blog when I die, when I no longer pay the monthly bill? What happens to my emails when my card no longer covers the autopay on the account?

Note (26 Feb 2018): This post was written some years ago about Scrivener 2. It does not apply to Scrivener 3, which has happily addressed these gripes. This shouldn’t be so hard. I’ve reached the point where it’s time to compile my manuscript from Scrivener into Word format, in preparation for The Great Editing. Now, the Compile part is easy. (Well, I say “easy” in that it’s pretty complicated, but in a Scrivener way, and after you’ve been using Scrivener for a while, well, you eventually become something akin to a taxi driver in London; you eventually learn where those dead-ends and obscure addresses are....

Note (26 Feb 2018): This post was written some years ago about Scrivener 2. It does not apply to Scrivener 3. As a writing tool, I love Scrivener. Unfortunately this comes with some hindrances: Scrivener is not a standard format, so you have to compile and export anything you do to to anything with it. Microsoft Word is a standard format in publishing—obviously people in publishing are a bunch of masochists—but Scrivener’s exports to Word are unstyled....

It’s not that we need a second screen, it’s that we have an inadequate first screen. If we’re watching a great movie, we’re engrossed, swept away. We’re not even thinking about the phone in the pocket or purse. We’re not wondering what’s happening on Facebook or Pinterest. We’re not even thinking about that. That’s the point, isn’t it?

Regular keyboards give me a pain — a pain in the wrist, specifically. It makes a huge difference when you’re typing a lot for emails, blog posts, proposals, articles … and novels. In the ’90s, I used an ergonomic Microsoft keyboard, but by today’s standards, it was a mushy experience. I couldn’t just adapt that old thing. I needed to find a modern solution. So I tried three different ergonomic keyboards....