Writing

Update: Both 11/9 and my second technothriller, The Billion Dollar Heist, are now available on Amazon.

Of all the stereotypes we hear about Apple owners, there is perhaps none so enduring as the guy writing a novel on his MacBook in Starbucks. Well, one November, I became that guy. Fast-forward a few years, and I have a 110,000-word technothriller ready to unleash on an unsuspecting public.

I’d had an idea for a novel years earlier, but I’d initially done what almost everyone does when they have an idea for a novel: absolutely nothing. The gap between having an idea and having a completed novel seemed too enormous to contemplate, especially when it would have to be combined with, you know, working for a living.

But then someone told me about something called NaNoWriMo: National Novel Writing Month. Every November, around 400,000 people across the USA, UK, Canada and a number of other countries around the world attempt to write 50,000 words of a novel. I decided to become one of them–using Apple technology, naturally … 
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As you doubtless gathered from my recent Scrivener review, I’m a massive fan of the best Mac app I’ve ever used for creative writing. The TL;DR version is that I wouldn’t dream of attempting to write a novel in anything else. My only real grumble is that we’ve as yet seen no sign of the long-promised iPad version of the app.

I’ve used PlainText with a Dropbox sync as a way of working on Scrivener projects on my iPad, and that works well enough at the writing stage. At the planning, stage, though, I love the corkboard interface. I was thus really interested to see an iOS app that not only provides a very similar corkboard view, but which can export and import to and from Scrivener … 
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‘Writing a novel’ seems to be one of the default items on most people’s wish-lists. Most never start it, and most of those who start it never finish it, but if you want to make a serious attempt, using Scrivener would definitely be the biggest favor you could do yourself.

I must admit that the idea of specific software for creative writing stuck me as on odd one when I first encountered it. What’s wrong with Pages or Word? It was only once I tried it for myself that I understood.

What Scrivener does is bring together in one place all the resources you are likely to need to plan, research, write and either submit or self-publish a novel. Outlines, pen-portraits of characters, web pages, photos, notes, PDFs … absolute anything and everything that might help you create your opus magnum is right there all within a single app … 
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