It was easy to do this on WORD for the first twelve chapters.  Then I had to do some major editing and things were in different files.  Twelve chapters and sixty-thousand words was too much for WORD and for old computer.  I spent a day separating it all into chapters, and renaming the files so I knew what chapter each was.

This was a pain in the…

Um…

Neck.  We’ll go with neck.  That’s where the pain was.

Since I was stuck, research seemed the right place to go.  I hit DuckDuckGo and I was off to the races. I found the following six writing tools for authors.  I’m listing them here in no particular order.

LivingWriter was one that caught my eye.  It seemed to have all the things I needed.  It has a monthly subscription and a nice desktop app for both Windows (my system) and for those who like Mac.  It started as cloud based, and it still has that feel. 

NOVLR is another cloud-based app.  I like that it has a built-in grammar checker.  Better than Word, not as good as Grammarly.  I ran a quick test, it was okay, but it did not get me to the point of committing to the tool.  I kept comparing it to Word.  The story, chapter and scene capability made it better.

Dabble was a nice tool.  It had a few cool features, but if felt like a word processor with a few enhancements to help keep track of the various chapters and scenes.  Just like LivingWriter, this too is a subscription-based app.  For some reason I’m not keep in paying every month.

I also looked at Manuskript, and Quoll writer.  Excellent for some.  They are both robust in a narrowly focused set of options. 

The perfect solution for me would be something Word but with Chapters, Scenes, and the ability to keep track of where I am.  I also, after looking at the five above, the last two are free by the way, I wanted to have more options.

My plot was laid out in Excel.  My story was in Word.  My notes about characters were in other Word files.  It got to the point where keeping track of where I had the character sheets was a hassle.

I was online talking to friends, and one mentioned Scrivener.  They made a big deal of Scrivener 3.  Surprise.  Scrivener 3, as of this blog post, is only available in the Mac version.  Great!  I read up on it.  I did some of the YouTube tutorials of version 1.9 (the previous version to 3).  It looked good.  It looked like it had all the tools I thought of.  It had one more thing I immediately loved.  You can export directly to ebook formats.  That was a big interest.

I looked at the layout of the screen.  It can be intimidating.  As a pilot friend of mine once told me, learn to look at the instrument panel, one section, one set of related functions at a time.  I started looking through the free trial period. 

I learned to copy from Word into Scrivener.  That was a pain.  I created the pages, one copy-paste at a time.  I learned how to use the character sheets.  They were not in my format.  I found out later, I could have created my own, but that was later.  I figured out how to put notes, and more notes.  I had key character information for each scene right there.  I used labels to show if it was a first, second, or third draft. 

I decided to buy it.  I promised that I would be able to upgrade for free with Scrivener 3.0 came out for Windows.

I’m now a few chapters in, and I’ve tested the print draft mode.  The first one was hilarious and not so good.  But I got better.  I did want to try reading my story on my phone, so I created a .epub and from that I was able to use the Kindle tools to convert it to .mobi.  From there I sent it to my kindle app and I was reading my own novel on my phone.

I’m not sure what other tool I might have liked better.  But, for now at least, I like Scrivener.