Presuming of course I have filled my Scrivener project with them in the first place, but yes I can see the value if they are there. I’ll try not to whinge too much below…
Mind you, I don’t normally try out new software on my current project, so having a hankering I dug an old crusty incomplete trunk manuscript and starting trying to update it. That’s on my list of problems (but not my issue with AT or Scrivener, or even yWriter where it was before Scrivener). But I’ve found the old story has grown on me and is getting an honest swing at a rejuvenation. It also means that the Scrivener version is the fourth generation copy of what was started in WordPad on Microslop Vista 17 years ago.
I’m working on Aeon’s lingo so please forgive me if I’m using the incorrect terms, but from where I’m typing this morning, I keep seeing a lot of secretarial work ahead of me to use AT that Scrivener gleefully allows me to procrastinate on until the 12th of Never (keywords and synopses being the biggies). It may be that I’m too much of a chaos writer for such rigid structure, but I needed the ability to visualize timing and how it interacts with a mundane and then plot calendars.
To wit, I’ve got these little chicklet badges out the wazoo, so much so that they don’t offer anything. The dates are important, but I’m not hardly seeing the width of the datelines for the staggered view on the Timeline view. The Subway view per instance not based directly on time so while it could help me keep up with who is and isn’t in a scene, it’s not why I wanted the help.
I am seeing things like how the hours stack up against the MC’s work/live balance and that is heplful, but I’m having to resist the urge to add other ‘off-stage’ tasks, I’ve got one for his mundane job’s schedule and now I’m considering adding another for his hours spent sleeping. At least in the first Act of book 1… Silly right? I’m focused on minutiae rather than the story.
Here we get into my personal problem areas, and that is keyword tagging and writing synopses. I remember when tags or keywords (I can’t remember what they called them) came out as a new feature on LiveJournal (yes, I’m dating myself) and thought it was an interesting thing but one that I didn’t use right away, because I didn’t want to have to go back through the years and tag everything I had posted before. This feels similar, especially since I’ve got roughly four thirds of books of a trilogy written (just not exactly contiguous). The entire scope spans around 7 thousand years, plus or minus (and more plus than minus since the witness is unreliable)… but I digress.
Aside from the clever way the two programs can talk with each other, I’m finding I’m having issues with all of the name boxes being on by default and am not sure how to turn any of them off without turning the view of the feature off. I was expecting more grandularity and instead I must be looking in the wrong place on the Event pane (on the right) when I’m adding details about the blips that get imported from Scrivener when I split a scene or add a chapter.
Incidentally, this was the same stumbling block that kept me from making better use of Storylines or Writer’s Cafe way back. The side work maintaining the structure on the days when the words won’t come.
And I’ve lost track of the number times I’ve looked at a scene in AT and had to switch back to Scrivener to see details or something else (this is my failing in not generating keywords and synopses, but I’m still salty about it). It doesn’t help in the slightest that the section I’m focused on is early in the story and it was a several months I handwaved away with some telling-not-showing narration in the original 2009 draft. I’ve learned a few things about the craft since then.
I’m starting to worry that I’m going to spend all my time sharpening the saw and not any time cutting firewood before winter.
