Sometimes you use systems to measure things that can’t be measured, because that’s better than not measuring anything at all.

The writer’s daily wordcount is a great example of this. We know, as writers, that you can have a great writing day which only results in 12 words, if they’re the right words at the right time, and you can have a rotten writing day and still produce 3000 words (which may in fact have to be disposed of in a seedy back alley somewhere later). We know that setting a daily wordcount is an imperfect way of recording the progress of a novel.

But those of us who do track wordcounts generally do so because – you have to track something. It’s hard to pin down in a spreadsheet whether you wrote good usable words or crappy steaming piles of crap, but it’s easy to check the wordcounter and type in that today, you achieved 1146 more words than you had yesterday.

Sometimes a work day consists entirely of deleting words, and you know it’s the best thing for the novel, but you still feel glum when you enter a negative number in your little spreadsheet, or word counter. Much the same, I suppose, as someone exercising to lose weight, who knows they have put on muscle instead of fat, and thus have made progress, and yet… the numbers make them sad.

The main reason to track wordcount is that a novel is a huge, unwieldy thing. By dividing it up into small achievable daily goals, you can see your way out of the project, see your way almost to the end. There’s a huge difference between 100,000 words of polished almost-publishable goodness and 100,000 words of draft zero, and yet the numbers matter. They keep us going. They get us out of bed in the morning.

They provide a light at the end of the tunnel.

I honestly don’t know how writers who don’t keep track of wordcount deal with writing a novel. How do they cope without those little happy moments of achieving tangible progress? How do they deal with all the other things that have to be done in their life, if they don’t have a random number that they can hit each day and then feel satisfied that they have “done” their day’s work? Do they measure by hours at the desk? By chapters under their belt?

But there are some days when you can achieve progress, wonderful wonderful progress, without setting any words on the page at all.

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It’s been an odd sort of a day – stress and phone calls, mostly. Every time the phone rang, I lost a little bit more of my equilibrium. My iPod came to the rescue, and I had Radio Free Skaro podcasts running for most of the day. I finished a quilt top I’ve been working on for some time, and picked up a different quilting project that’s been abandoned for months, without even hesitating. Yay for podcasts.

I’ve been nibbling away at Cabaret of Monsters in Scrivener – labelling and rereading scenes, figuring out notes to myself about what editing has to be done, but not really getting any momentum up and running. I get like this, close to deadlines – it’s like I have to create extra pressure by not working on it until the time left to do it shrinks to the point that I can’t ignore it any more.

And then I have to work like I’m on fire.

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So I’ve been playing with Scrivener for a couple of days now, and it’s pretty cool, I have to say. I’ve uploaded the manuscript of Cabaret of Monsters (book 2 of the Creature Court) and have been footling with the features – dividing it into scenes (ridiculously easy) and labelling each scene with title, synopsis, keywords.

Okay, I’ve only done a couple of scenes. But I am enjoying the process and this seems to be a very good way to get back in contact with my novel after a six-seven week separation. It’s also well and truly doing the job of getting the novel back in my head – out driving yesterday evening I was thinking about it, turning the story and characters over and over. Thank goodness!

One of the things that I’ve realised is that the second half of the novel, which I wrote super-fast and finished in a haze of sleep deprivation as I tiptoed back to the novel after having Jem, is written entirely in the wrong order. I wrote chunks of scenes/plot with the same characters when they are actually going to need to be separated out. So… yes, Scrivener is my friend! I’m going to need it over the next couple of months.

Catherynne Valente (@catvalente) tweeted recently that she also opens a Scrivener ‘project’ each season (winter, spring, etc), and uses it for all of her short story and non fiction WIPs. This seemed like a brilliant idea, so I did this too, uploading my Sprawl-submission-in-progress and my Leviathan-review-in-progress. Which of course means that I didn’t progress either project today.

I did, however, make shortbread with my big girl, introduce my littlest girl to the wonders of Bonjela (yes, teething already) and we managed to take some vaguely Christmassy photos today.

Also, my review of Rampant by Diana Peterfreund is up at AsIf!

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.