I have a friend who has just finished a draft novel, and I’m lucky enough to be able to do some pre-reading for her.\u00a0 She emailed it in a Word document, which I received in one email account on several different devices.\u00a0 First, I opened it on the iPad, which sent it to Pages for iPad to be read.\u00a0 I did my initial read through there.\u00a0 Loved the book!\u00a0 But, of course, I’m supposed to find things a reader will find and wonder about, and there are some of those things.<\/p>\n
The next task is to capture my comments on the book in a meaningful way I can give back to my friend.\u00a0 How can I do that?\u00a0 There are several ways, but they’re all pretty cumbersome.<\/p>\n
Then I realized I have Scrivener 2.0<\/a> (which my friend does not use, but that won’t be a problem, I don’t think).\u00a0 The draft was formatted for submission to her agent, so chapters were clearly delineated.\u00a0 Scrivener has this wonderful feature called, “Document, Split, With Selection as Title.”\u00a0 I could import the Word document into Scrivener, so I saved it from my email on the Mac Mini, opened Scrivener, created a blank project called “Manuscript Title” where I put the title of my friend’s work in.\u00a0 Then, I selected “File, Import” and navigated to the file name.<\/p>\n I broke out the title page and each subsequent chapter into separate files in the draft folder — all thirty-two chapters.<\/p>\n I’m also checking the timeline as I read through it this time, so I created Custom Meta Data (a\u00a0 wonderful new feature in Scrivener 2.0) for “Date.”<\/p>\n I use a three pane setup with the Binder in the left column, the text of the document in the center, and the Inspector open in the right column.\u00a0 If I wanted to summarize each chapter, I could do so in the index card in the top of the inspector column.\u00a0 But for this purpose, I use the Custom Meta Data window to add the date for each chapter and the document notes section in the bottom\u00a0 of the Inspector pane for my comments as I read through each chapter.<\/p>\n I should be able to export my comments to a separate document, delineated by Chapter to send to my friend when I’m done.\u00a0 If she were interested, I could send her the entire scrivener file, and she could see all these things and play with that, but I don’t know if it will fit with the way she works.<\/p>\n So far, it’s a smooth, comfortable way to add my comments to the novel without having to shift between multiple programs of worry about whether track changes or comments will work in Word.<\/p>\n If you want to try it, Literature and Latte offers a free 30 day trial.<\/a> Also, there’s a beta version of what’s essentially Scrivener 1.54 available for Windows users now.\u00a0 Beta 1.4 has just been released, and I’ll offer it should be a pretty stable beta version (I used beta 1.3 for NaNo and didn’t have any problems).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I have a friend who has just finished a draft novel, and I’m lucky enough to be able to do some pre-reading for her.\u00a0 She emailed it in a Word document, which I received in one email account on several different devices.\u00a0 First, I opened it on the iPad, which …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading","category-writing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2421","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2421"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2421\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14770,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2421\/revisions\/14770"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}