This originally appeared on Martintiller.com.
I know. I know.
I am supposed to love the new writing app Scrivener.
It's supposed to be the great thing, since, well ever.Scrivener is to some writers, what Apple is some designers and photographers.
In other words...without error. The Second Coming.
So I bought a copy and began writing my next book with it.
It took a while to be able to get a hold of how it works. It changes how everything is organizer, which I guess is the point.
But I found I was taking a lot of time to learn the software.
A lot of time.
Time that could have better been spent, I don't know, writing the book.
Even if that meant writing the book in Word.
The HORROR!
Scrivener is supposed to be able to do just about everything. Export to Word, Export to PDF, Export to Modi and Epub, and send your mother a card.
Maybe not that last one.
But then I saved my work for the first time. And what appeared wasn't a file, but a folder. And then I tried to save a back-up in the same area.
Scrivener told me I couldn't do that.
Why not?
I don't know.
But most importantly, later I lost work.
I lost a whole chapter of my next book. And that shouldn't happen. And it almost ruined my beach vacation.
I was at the Outer Banks and sitting on the outside porch of the condo we were renting. I had a good view of the beach. I pulled out my laptop and set it on the table with the sound of the ocean waves and I opened my book up and Scrivener told me something about a corrupted file.
(I admit I don't remember exactly what it said as my eyes went dark and my head exploded.)
But corrupted to Scrivener apparently meant only the most current chapter I had been working on.
After exporting the other chapters to Word to get another back-up I continue to write my next book in Scrivener. I don't know why. Word had never lost any words I have created.
For some reason I kept trying to write the book in Scrivener. One thing that I like about Scrivener is that I can see notes on the current section I am writing. I don't have to flip back and forth between files.
I like that I can see notes in the bottom right. But note that the file was named to show that I was missing Chapter 10.
After some research I learned that I probably lost the chapter because I had been saving it to the cloud in my Onedrive.
Ummm...it's 2015. Cloud saving is a non-negotiable.
I work on two main computers. I have a desktop with a larger monitor 27 inch and a Lenovo thinkpad that I carry around. Not being able to switch easily between those two machines makes writing too difficult.
Then I joined a Scrivener group to see if I could learn what I did wrong, but I proceeded to see several posts with people losing work. And losing work because through cloud storage.
Scrivener is a great idea on paper, but save yourself the trouble, and your work. But if you are losing time to learn HOW to use the tool, as opposed to writing, then work with something else.
George RR Martin writes those massive popular novels on a DOS Machine.
DOS.
Maybe he is on to something.