ConnectedText vs. Scrivener

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Mar 6, 2012 at 06:51 PM

First of all, thank you Hugh, Franz and Dr. Andus for your helpful suggestions. I will always welcome advice from this community,* which I respect and enjoy so much.

I have already chunked the manuscript up in Scrivener, but that’s as far as I got. If I could sit down with this project and concentrate on it for a couple of weeks, I think Scrivener would work great. But I don’t have that kind of time to devote to it. I can squeeze in a half an hour here, and hour there. But this is a job that really can’t be done in that way, because I lose track of my train of thought. That’s why I think that being able to annotate the manuscript chunks would be helpful.

I may look into Word, but I do not own a copy and would have to buy one. Not sure that’s in the cards.

And here’s the real truth: I suspect that the actual answer to this problem—one I’ve been trying to avoid—is to scrap this manuscript and start from scratch.** (Which is the advice I got from a professional editor who took a look at it.)

Anyway, I remain open to any other suggestions, and apologize to Dr. Andus for hi-jacking his thread.

Steve Z.

*Excpetion: advice on women from JBFrom.
**(In case anyone is curious, this project is a book-length history of the historic site that the organization I volunteer with wants to get published. We paid a local historian to write the manuscript—few people know the history of the site better than this man, but it turns out his writing skills are pretty inept. And, for the record, I questioned his writing skills before we hired him, but I was out voted by the committee.)