Two new ways of working
Acrobat 9
I’m not about to go into graphic detail about the woes and hassles of my recent dealings with Adobe, especially Adobe Japan. Suffice it to say that I find their sales and marketing policies (not to mention their draconian licensing schemes) to be distinctly anti-user, but - and I hate to say it… their products are actually not that bad at all.
I’ve just upgraded to the latest version of the Creative Suite (the Premium version, giving me all kinds of Web and paper goodies), and the upgrade gives me many excellent tools which help me write, and also play around with graphics as well as words.
One of the most useful things I’ve discovered is the new version of Acrobat (9) included in this grab bag. The Pro version which comes with the Creative Suite allows real collaboration between author and publisher. I’ve been doing some editing and layout work for a London publisher, with the author of the material somewhere else (he’s an international consultant, so he might be in the UK, Canada or Hungary at any one time). The report I’ve been taking care of is a heavyweight piece of writing (about 400 pages, and about 12MB when reduced to PDF from InDesign) - not the sort of thing that you really want to be pushing around through various revisions.
Acrobat has had some kind of comment/review system for some time, but it’s been taken to new heights with the latest version. If you have the full Acrobat, you can join the (currently free) Acrobat.com, and distribute PDFs to specified recipients without their going through the mailbox and disturbing the system administrators. Not only that, but the recipients can use free software (Adobe Reader) to add their comments to the Web-based PDF and send back the comments through the Web. The whole of the distribution list can then see what comments and corrections have been used and add their own additional remarks. Although such a system has been available in the past, typically it has been slow and cumbersome, in fact, too slow for real live use. But in this case, someone who’d never used the system before sent back several hundred updates and corrections, which I was able to incorporate into the finished layout within a day or so. A great improvement in productivity all round. Acrobat 9 - highly recommended if you work with other people on your writing, editing or layout projects.
StoryMill
The other new way of working involves creative writing – specifically, novels. I’ve just discovered a piece of software called StoryMill (there are others from the same people for screenwriting, story development, blogging and even poetry). This looks fantastic, and though I’m still on the evaluation, I am probably going to buy it in the next few days - software like this deserves encouragement. I’ve done a lot with Jer’s Novel Writer in the past (1 1/2 novels), but Story Mill seems to suit my style of writing better.
The basic writing unit here is the Chapter, and below that there are Scenes which you assign to Chapters. Each Scene can have notes associated with it, which live side by side with the Scene. Characters have their own place in the scheme of things, and so do Locations, so it’s possible to have a list of all Scenes containing Little Red Riding Hood in the Grandmother’s Cottage, for example, and correct discrepancies (the properties of the Characters and Scenes are also stored there). There’s even a timeline along which you can drag scenes, assigning them to the different storylines within your masterpiece.
Tasks to perform, and a place to stash additional research notes along with the writing are other little goodies. The program saves your work automatically, at regular intervals (cool) and even automatically saves to your iDisk, meaning you can take your novel on the road with the minimum of hassle.
Each section (Chapter, Section, Character, Location) can have a status assigned to it like 1st draft, 2nd draft, etc. - anyone who thinks writing a novel is just a matter of stream of consciousness has never written a novel and there’s even a handy progress meter that switches between the total number of words in the novel as compared with your target for the completed thing, or as you type, the meter climbs towards the figure for the day’s session. And the icing on the cake includes export to major popular formats (including .docx) and submission templates, etc. which I’ll tell more you about when I’ve finished this novel (provisionally entitled “At the Sharpe End”).
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