Day 120 – Water, Water, Everywhere…

Not much to report today. I read more of “Story Structure Demystified” earlier today (should finish it in the next day or two) and have started working out in my head how to structure my own loose story. I’m finding that I already have a lot of the structural pieces already in place, though some are definitely out of place at the moment.

Tom Chandler asked in the yesterday’s comments whether or not I’d be using special writing software to help with outlining and writing the second draft. I’ve played with these programs before, but hadn’t thought about it again until Tom mentioned it. I downloaded Scrivener, which was until recently Mac-only software (the PC version is now in beta). I like the way that it helps writers visualize the story in terms of structure. I also like how you can bring in all your research materials including text, images, and even video.

I’m going to try it, but already I feel itchy — I find I do my best writing in Word for some reason. Writing in other programs like Notepad makes me self-conscious enough that I don’t do my best work. (I use Word even for writing most blog posts, as a matter of fact, and then import the text into WordPress…) It’s probably a psychological thing, but either way, you have to go with what works.

In other news — I spruced up the website a bit, you probably have noticed. Changed the background, changed the header image a bit, and added fancy new fonts for the blog title and the blog post titles. It’s not a huge change, but it personalizes it somewhat, I think.

Until tomorrow,

~Graham