I’ve been forced back to using OpenOffice.org’s Writer to compose my WIP – Tyrmia due to an unfortunate experience in Scrivener. While I loath using word processors for writing in general, the experience using Writer is less evil than using Word. I have even managed to set it up to look pretty good. But there are a few little things that I wish I could do.
1. I dearly want a user defined word dictionary that gets appended to the actual document that I am writing instead of the program that I am using to write the document. It should not matter whether I’m using Word or Writer, if I open my novel, I want the unique words of my novel to be recognized and not treated like red underlined pariah.
2. On that same note; if I add a word to my user defined dictionary, I want it to be smart enough to recognize the word when I happen to add an “s” to the end of it. I mean, come on, it does this with regular words. I know, the computer only knows what I tell it, but surely there could be a plural cause in the logic that recognizes the root word.
3. I love Andale Mono font. Please make it free so I can use it on Linux. Please!
I know these things probably don’t bother anyone else, if they did, they would have been solved by now. But man would it make my writing life so much easier.
I think Tobias Buckell used to use TextEdit or facsimile before he went to Scrivener. You know, I love Scrivener. I really do. But it ate half of Tyrmia a few weeks ago and now I don’t trust it at all. Luckily I did a download of Tyrmia before it happened so I did not lose anything.
Scrivener has the right idea by using the IDE concept from programming, but it is severely limited to Mac only. I love the Mac OS as much as the next person, but it is not my beloved Linux. I want a writer’s editor that works on all platforms and preferably one that does not eat my novels.
Things are in the works that I can’t disclose at this time, but when I can talk, you will be invited to participate. Let’s just say that my writing woes are being quietly addressed. Shhhh! *Looks around for anyone reading this except for Steve.
My dirty little secret is that I’ve been writing my WIP in TextEdit. I didn’t expect that it would make such a difference, but for some strange reason it does. I do final layout by copying into Word (and setup headers for contact and page numbering). I’ve tried doing edits in Word, but I get stymied. Open the RTF in TextEdit, and I flow through it.
And now I’m wondering what happened in Scrivener as I was going to pay them money sometime soon to try the next novel in it (as I need more help organizing it).