I have an extremely busy week coming up. Plans include a
Lions meeting and then a trip to Ohio,
where I’ll be attending the Military Writers Society of America annual
conference. No vacation, that! I’m
scheduled to participate in two discussion panels, one on using primary sources
for historical research and another on marketing. Those two don’t require a
great deal of preparation, since they’ll be based on an open format and there are
several other participants in each one.
We’ll just let the discussions lead us. The other two sessions, however, require advance
preparation. (I feel like I’m prepping class lectures again. ) The first
involves a demonstration of how to use Scrivener, a software program for
writers. At first I thought it would be easy.
I’d just put one of my old book manuscripts up on the screen and point
out how I used the program. But no such luck! First, Scrivener put out a new
edition, which meant I had to relearn some of the commands. And now my old manuscript didn’t demonstrate
the very best features of the new program. What to do? My solution was to take the time to set up a
program for my next novel. Again, not as easy as it sounds! I could have just
faked it, I suppose, but I figured that as long as I was doing it, I might as
well end up with something I could really use in the future. So I’m chin-deep
in my genealogy files and distracted by old family pictures that reveal
qualities I didn’t know my characters had.
For example, I never realized that one cousin was an alcoholic until I
started noticing that in every family get-together, she was passed out in a
corner. She could have had narcolepsy, I suppose, but from the other evidence
of glasses and bottles, I don’t think so. Interesting stuff, but a distraction
from the original purpose. |
