Finding my words

Do you use Scrivener to write? I find it excellent for organising my book into chapters and scenes, but I didn’t think it was excellent last week, when my manuscript refused to open. It’s hard to stop that panicked feeling when that happens. Had I lost my words? They were all on my portable hard drive, but I needed Scrivener to open the back up and it wasn’t playing ball.

After many false starts, and the change to some coding, I was able to open it – turns out there is a bug (yet to be fixed) that activates if you shut down while on full screen. You don’t know how many times my mouse pointer has hovered over the red (close) dot on the Mac and I’ve thought: Stop! Minimise first!

Then I had this awful thought that I was missing chunks of my novel. Turns out I’d moved some scenes from Notes into the MS but the “include in compile” box wasn’t ticked. Thanks to whichever blogger shared that fix … I found my missing words and the word count bumped back up.

The good thing is, after those mishaps, I found my writing zone and I’ve since written two more chapters – they are difficult, emotional ones. My characters have had a setback and are trying to deal with it, but there are challenging times ahead. It’s all the fault of a nosy resident in the small town they’ve moved to. I’ve also changed the working title to Wherever You Go, which fits the story better.

In other news, I’m hard at work editing the Writing the Dream project for Serenity Press. The book, to be released in November, finally has a cover.

There are also some other exciting things happening behind the scenes with Serenity Press, which are being sorted over the coming weeks. One is the Serenity Press Retreat in Ireland next year …

So, I’ve found my words,  in more ways than one, and I’m enjoying getting stuck into the meaty part of my novel. How are your words going?