Camp NaNoWriMo and Scrivener

I can’t believe that April is almost here already…where DOES the time slip away to? The last couple months since our move, I’ve been slowly working on the first stages of editing my book. And it’s gone s  l  o  w.

First, I read through the whole thing, taking notes of everything from the wrong word choice to the places where some scenes needed to move to. It took a long time. But eventually I got through it. Then, I had to start the real editing! Not too long ago, I heard of a free program called “yWriter”. yWriter was built with writers in mind, making it possible to break the book up into individual scenes for more bite-sized chunks to work with.

So I downloaded yWriter, and set to work. After doing some main editing (moving a whole chapter several chapters down, breaking up the main text into smaller scenes, etc.), I realised I had made a bad formatting mistake that would require hours of work if I didn’t correct it now. But to correct it I had to forget about all the changes I had done so far and redo them later! Argh. To say the least, I wasn’t very happy about it at all.

Just after I found the problem, I saw somewhere that Scrivener was on a half-price sale for a very limited time. And that got me thinking…I had seen somewhere that if we won NaNo, we would get a coupon with a 50% discount on Scrivener. So I looked it up, and long story shorter, I found out the coupon was still valid (although they said it wasn’t!), and I was able to get Scrivener for half price.

Last Friday, after figuring out how Scrivener works, I was able to rescue all the changes I had done so far on yWriter, and get it all done (with the formatting corrected!) in much less time and sweat than it took in the first place. So it’s an understatement to say I’m hooked on Scrivener! It makes the job SO much easier!

My goals at this point are to be done editing by the end of April (not impossible, but challenging), work on the finishing touches and read through it again in early May, and from there I either want to ask some friends for a heavy critique or go ahead and order some free proof copies from CreateSpace (another “prize” for winning NaNo).

All that just depends on how things go. I’m joining Camp NaNo next month, and hopefully that will be encouraging enough that I’ll be able to get the editing finished. I only have about 3 scenes to do a day, so surely that won’t be too hard? :) Depends on how much changing needs done, I guess. And how much time I have to work on it.

Well, I better be off. Editing awaits me tomorrow.I don’t want to fail, and yet I’m feeling a bit of the “I’m not sure I can do this!” feeling that I had before starting NaNo in 2013. Through God, though, I know I can. :)

Keep writing!
Esther

P.S. I’m thinking about trying to do a small update each day during Camp NaNo, like I did during last November, just to keep me a bit more accountable. :) How do all of you feel about it? Think I should try, or not bother? Would you read it? Thanks!