Confession time: I’ve been avoiding my novel. I finished it in a haze of sleeplessness, before the end of October. Then there was NaNo November, in which I very sensibly wrote the first 50,000 words of Book 3, including scads of backstory.

And then, you know, December hit and I fell over in a heap. When I recovered, peeping over the precipice, it was to catch up on Deepings Dolls work, neglected for over a month, to deal with Christmas and birthday responsibilities (Raeli’s birthday is in late Jan but during school holidays which meant invites had to out NOW) and to return to that short story I promised  girliejones I would submit to Sprawl. (I have an awesome set up, characters and theme, but they keep trying to wind the story up too soon, too soon!)

But I have a deadline looming on the horizon. The 19 February, to be exact. And what I don’t want to do is my usual trick of delaying the beginning of a project in order to create heated momentum and frantic pressure at the other end. I just don’t think I’m up to it. I have to get started now, before Christmas, or risk losing all of December.

I took steps today by using my NaNo discount to purchase Scrivener for peanuts. (heh well 23 shiny gold peanuts) Cabaret of Monsters is a big, sprawling novel with several subplots and crisscrossing narrative threads, and the first draft may be finished and largely unbroken, but there are some massive cracks spreading across the manuscript, from edge to edge.

So far I’ve just gone through the comprehensive tutorial of Scrivener and it looks like exactly what I need. I’ll update on how it works for me in the future, since I assume at least some of you have Macs and may be interested. I’ve never been a fancy software person, but the first book in this trilogy required 8 separate excel worksheets and a Zulupad glossary to keep it even vaguely straight – and with all the back and forthing I regularly tangled myself in knots of continuity. I’m hoping Scrivener can save my neck.

And I’m already thinking with interest of how I might write a novel differently if I composed it in Scrivener to start with. Ah well, maybe the one after next.

Tags: cabaret of monsters, scrivener, writing