The book is up to 35k. It’s a stat that’s easy to see when working in MS Word, it’s right there at the bottom of the page. But I’m writing this book in Scrivener where you have to select an option and wait for a few seconds while it gets you the total. I don’t mind waiting, but tonight it got me to thinking about how you actually write the words has an impact on the whole process of idea to book. I know writers who write longhand on paper (I could never.) My penmanship is atrocious and my spelling is worse, so it’s typing for me.

I type roughly 80wpm. Thank you, Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. Although I use a laptop, I have it hooked up to an aux keyboard because I love myself. I typed my first book almost entirely on my laptop while sitting on the couch, but there’s no way I’d put myself through that again. I work from home most days so I’ve got the full rig, large monitor, aux keyboard and mouse. I have a hub to connect everything and switch it from my work laptop to my personal one after I’m done with the day job.

The only drawback is that I sit for hours. I wish I could stand, but I lack both the will power and the knees for it. On the weekends, I try to be as active as possible. Not that it exactly makes up the deficit, it’s a work in process. I’m trying to be faithful to getting steps in every hour, but at the moment, it’s more aspirational than practical.

Getting back to word processors, Scrivener is harder to use than Word, but it offers some advantages. The PC Version is not as nice as the Mac though. The main reason I use it in the early stages is so I can skip around and write scenes or even just bits of dialog and have a place to store them while I’m working. I estimate how many words the book will be, break that into chapters and create folders. From there I write scenes and move them around as I need. If a scene works better in Chapter 2 than 4, I can easily move it. Scrivener has a cork-board sort of layout where you can move bits around easily. Some authors use an actual board and note cards. I am not this cool.

It’s also handy to have the book in outline form. There’s probably a way to do that in Word, but I’m too lazy to figure that out. As soon as I have the rough draft ready to go, I compile it in Scrivener and then export to Word. All editing takes place in Word. That’s been true for every novel I’ve written. All the critique partners and editors I’ve worked with use Word as well. It’s easy and almost everyone knows how to use it so it makes sense.

Once the rough draft has been polished into a first draft I print two copies. One goes to my best friend and the other to my mom. They are my alpha readers. After that, I usually reach out to other authors I’ve worked with in the past to be my beta readers. I’ve had critique partners before, and I highly recommend writers starting out to find others in their genre to partner with. Currently, I don’t have a partner, but I’ll be reaching out to author friends when the time comes.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog and you’d like to be a beta reader or you’re a fellow writer and would like to be a critique partner, please get in touch! cricketmacd@gmail.com