Tuesday, November 12

I woke up about 2:45 this morning and didn’t get back to sleep again. Or if I did it wasn’t for very long. I finally sat up and started reading at about 5:30. I had woken thinking about my thesis and thought about it through the rest of the night. Fortunately most of these were useful thoughts.

I finalised a new order for the writings that makes much more sense. It also answers the question: why can I not find a conclusion to the argument? Seen in a new way I now have a conclusion. See in this way I have now written about 90% of what I need to write, not the 60% I had been thinking.

I decided that Scrivener was simply not working for me. I could not get to grips with its “proper” usage, and it left me with no sensible way to get material to and from my iPad. I had been using the iPad to read through what I had written and edit it. I had also been using to tighten sections by reading and rereading them and then rewriting chunks of them. This had proved incredibly useful but had required me to us .txt files. Scrivener put a stop to all that.

Realising that this was a serious problem that had been slowing me down I searched forums and blogs and by dawn I had found Liquid Story Binder. This doesn’t use .txt files but it does use standard .rtf files.

I spent the morning with Jutta and Thomas listening to the initial presentations of the fleshed-out concepts the groups in Interactive Storytelling had devised. We also created another group, from people who had been away filming last week, and set them off.

After a lunch of minute pork steak (as in sixty seconds and not incredibly small, I think), I spent the rest of the day and evening with Liquid Story Binder. It works as a Portable App, and it is happy having its files stored in Dropbox. This means that it can have the chapter files read by a rich text editor on the iPad. The minor problem is that these are thin on the ground and only one of them is any good at all – Textilus – and it has a very cack-handed way of syncing to Dropbox. Sync it does though, and some back-and-forth testing demonstrated that I can get a very workable system from the two.

I would be delighted if Textilus had the beauty and grace of Writeroom , and maybe it will one day; but I am very happy that the new system works at all.

To make all this even better it turns out that, for me at least Liquid Story Binder is much, much easier to use than Scrivener ever was. I had read blogs saying it had a very steep learning curve but within a couple of hours I had everything I had written installed in a binder, and knew how I could get all my notes, drawing and photos in there in a way that would make sense to me.

Now I am about to leave Arcada. I have a new draft, with all three sections completely rearranged. I have two chapters corrected, and I have started to enter all the reference material I have collected into the binder. Outside it is raining. Inside I can see plugs and sockets.

I am electric.