#WritersCoffeeClub Ch 7 Nbr 30 — How do you keep track of your work? Do you have a system?
How do I organize my headspace and digital authorial sprawl? It's fun reading your work again for the first time, right...? Not.
Previously: One Pages document per work, whether fiction or an essay. All in folders in the iCloud documents Page folder. If I had to track events, characters, treatments, plot points, etc., I'd have another file named Work + Treatment.
Now: I have switched to Scrivener for new work. It's not perfect, especially in that there isn't consistency in functionality between the iPhone, iPad, and Mac versions, with me using the iPhone for review, the iPad for composition and proofing, and the Mac rarely for composition and reviewing. I like that there are options for storing meta information in folder, including pictures and links. I've actually used the character templates so I don't forget who's who and what they look like. I like that it has build-in versioning (snapshots and mobile snapshots), and that when there are sync errors, I can set a snapshot of the current chapter and paste the conflict document over it, then compare with the snapshot to see what got out-of-sync. It's annoying that snapshot functionality and file diff/versioning is a Mac-only feature, but it does sync, so there's that!
You'll get a kick out of this: I use Scrivener for tracking my Writers Coffee Club responses—actually, for all the prompts—especially since I currently can't get my Masto instance to generate an archive for me. (I think there may be a storage restriction around 110 MB, possibly a bug.) Anyway, I've included what that looks like as an image.
I use the status and color features for tracking publication for serialization of the work as is shown in the other image.
However, there is the other thing: I recently bought a Kindle Scribe. I use it for when I wake up in the middle of the night, with the backlight at really low power, to longhand write notes, to get them out of my head so I can sleep. This is working out very well, and it lets me email versions of the notebook file (good enough) so I can view it as a PDF in Books on the Apple platform. I've included pictures of that, too.
[Author retains copyright (c)2024 RS of text and pictures.]
