I learned a new word today: etiolate — which means “to grow pale and drawn due to lack of sunlight”. In other words, “to be Scottish”. I’ve been spending time lately — in addition to writing copy, of course — adapting to working on a new computer. For the most part, it’s been a joy, as I have to admit the applications available for the Mac are generally pretty as well as useful. Where before I was forcing generic apps into service for my projects, now I’m finding all kinds of programs already tailored specifically to the things I do.
For instance:
Project management
If my life works (and I’m pretty happy with it), it’s because I’ve learned how to work with projects and goals. I’m loving an application called Things because it allows me to use Getting Things Done-style organisation, but it isn’t overly rigid. It works the way I think.
I’m using Things to capture all my various projects and to-dos and get them out of my head, ’cause juggling all that stuff up there without any kind of dates or prioritisation just leads to stress. (Which leads to anger, which leads to the Dark Side, which leads to bad prequels.)
Writing software
I was also thrilled to find out that there’s software for organising a novel — a few packages, actually, but one in particular caught my eye. It’s called Scrivener, and it’s likely what my parents are buying me for my birthday, because I couldn’t find a shirt I liked.
For Finitude, I used Microsoft’s OneNote, which is an excellent clipping program, but I gathered endless web pages about climate change which then got commingled with my character notes and story ideas, making the whole thing a giant, fairly unmanageable swamp of information.
When I moved to the Mac, I was able to import everything into the cross-platform clipping program EverNote, which is brilliant, and adds the feature of storing all your notes in a ‘cloud’ so they’re available everywhere. But it suffers from the same kind of generalist approach OneNote did as a novel-writing tool. So I’ll see how Scrivener works for me.
As an aside, I believe that outlining is the key to the successful completion of a novel, and that lack of an outline — a map of where they’re going — is why most people never finish their first book.
Word processing/page layoutI’ve been using Apple’s Pages, part of their iWork suite, for my writing work, and it’s good, matching Word feature-for-feature, but topping it by having that general Apple pleasantness. I swore I wouldn’t become one of those zombie Apple fanboy/apologists, but the general experience of using this stuff is just nice. The one nuisance, though, is that you can’t just save to Word’s .DOC format (which my clients use), you have to export it — and remember to do that, not send them a .pages file!
But where this thing really comes out ahead is that I can not only use it to write copy and do the typography for my pages, I can also design my covers in it. I have a legal copy of QuarkXPress through work, but it can be a total bee-yatch when it comes to printing on a home printer, ’cause it’s made for commercial printing — newspapers, magazines, and other jobs done on industrial production equipment. Transferring my Quark licence to the new machine was shockingly easy (given how expensive, cranky, and troublemaking they used to be to deal with), but still, I’m happy to have a friendlier alternative to using a clunky PostScript layout program at home.
Page impostion
I’ve got a table at a book fair this weekend…
…so I figured I’d make a few more books in preparation for that. (I promise that, before long, I’m going to make a brand new bookbinding tutorial, ’cause my other one is pretty long in the tooth and doesn’t entirely reflect how I do it now.) For years I’ve been swearing by a program called ClickBook for doing imposition; “imposition” is the process of rearranging pages so they come out in the right order for binding (page four is on the back of page one, page three on the back of page two, etc). It’s pretty much impossible for a mortal to do without the aid of software, and most of the packages available for doing it cost an arm and a leg (like, thousands of dollars or pounds).
This fifty-buck program has been doing the trick for me for years. There’s a Macintosh version available, so I bought that, and figured “Bob’s your uncle!” Bob, it turns out, is not my uncle: My laser printer kept fainting part-way through printing — after just a few pages, actually. Not only was I wasting paper, this meant — gasp! “” I couldn’t print my own books at home anymore! This was a major deal.
Happily, there are other alternatives for the Mac. There’s a freeware program available, but it wasn’t up to the task and didn’t work for me. But another program, Cheap Impostor, makes imposition easy, and you can even adjust the size and position of your pages visually. It’s lovely, it’s free, or you can upgrade to the full feature set for just $35 (which I highly recommend), and its developer is friendly and very quick to respond to e-mails.
There’s just one catch: I print my books on A4 sheets, but four-up — that is, two sheets across the top of the page and two sheets across the bottom. It makes for nice, wee, easy-to-hold novels, and means I can make a cover for them out of A4 paper. ClickBook can print four-up (or eight-up, spanning a dozen sheets, whatever), but Cheap Impostor is focused simply on printing two facing pages on a sheet of paper. Would I have to lay out my books all over again? Re-do all the typesetting and redesign the covers? In time for the book fair? I really didn’t want to. And I like my books as they are.
Late, late at night, I managed to look at the problem from a different angle: don’t change the printout, change the paper. Cheap Impostor lets you choose any page size to print to, so I chose A5, cutting the pages in half then putting them into my laser printer (as opposed to printing them double-up then chopping them — I know, it was confusing to me at the time, too). It worked! Well, the A5 sheets have a tendency to jam in the printer, which isn’t great. But I can keep running my press, which is the main thing. And the developer is open to the idea of adding additional layouts to his program in the future.
~
Phew. I seem to like doing this: breaking all my systems and structures right when they’re working and starting all over. Note to self, though: Don’t do this when you’re facing deadlines! I’m off to Gleneagles tomorrow in Perthshire; it turns out the owner of the company I’m on retainer to is doing a speaking engagement there. (Which makes sense, ’cause a lot of our clients are in financials, and Edinburgh is a major financial centre in the UK — though closer to here would have been handier!) He’s a good man, and I admire him, even though we have very different ideas on some subjects. I’m sure it’ll be a great meal, and when the boss comes to town and requests your presence, you get to chuck all your deadlines oot the windae!
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