Tuesday 8 January 2008

Sick.

I received the lovely gift of a horrendous cold from baby Viking over christmas. Since then my head has been producing a positively kaleidoscopic variety of snot. Although death is no longer imminent I am a long way from feeling even vaguely human. I would like to use this as an excuse for my lack of writing during this period but the fact of the matter is that's not really the case. It hasn't helped though.

I'm playing around with some different writing tools at the moment. Specifically, Scrivener and Writeroom.
Scrivener is an extremely powerful package with all kinds of features like storyboarding and management tools for large writing projects. 
Writeroom is an absolutely basic, full-screen text  editor. No bells or whistles (or animated paperclips) of any kind. 
I am a notorious goldfish when it comes to focussing my attention on any one thing at a time so I am finding a full-screen editor to be quite useful in limiting my distractions (Scrivener has a full-screen mode as well I just noticed but I haven't used it much yet).

I suspect Scrivener would prove to be more useful if you were doing any kind of critical or technical writing where you needed to frequently refer to sources of some kind whereas Writeroom would shine in a purely creative environment where you weren't interested in anything other than getting the ideas on to the page.

I'll write an update when I've used them both a bit more.