You must read this.

I wish I’d linked to it yesterday for Mother’s Day, but you know, maybe not. Maybe it’s better when the day is over and yet, you’re still a mom. Or have a mom. Or just need to laugh. A lot. Or maybe even get misty-eyed.

What Toni wrote: The Stick Turned Blue

Go.

Read.

Now.

And while I’m talking about Toni, I ordered my copy of Bobbie Faye’s (kinda, sorta, not exactly) Family Jewels today. Yay!

Stupid or desperate?

Wow.

I mean, just, wow.

“I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,” she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article “that found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”

“There’s a pattern emerging here,” she said.

Scare the white people?  This is the last gasp?

I’m staggered.

More on Scrivener

The jury is in.

I’m buying it.

If you have a Mac and you have any kind of writing projects at all, you should download the demo and play with it.

I’m buying it on the strength of its pretty research corkboard but am sure I’ll be loving other features, too. I just haven’t gotten deep enough into my new project to use the other features.

Here is a pretty (small) image of a portion of my research corkboard right now. I don’t want it to be large enough for you to actually see much detail because these are images that I saved for my own inspiration and use but don’t have permissions to post and such, so I’m hoping you can get the idea but I won’t be abusing any artist’s rights or anything:

In addition to the images — four of characters, two of locations, one of period customs — you can see what looks like two 3×5s with typing on them. That’s the way they show up on the corkboard, but what they actually are are webpages that I’ve imported. Now when I find research on the web, instead of bookmarking and returning to it when I have web access, the actual webpages are saved as part of my research in Scrivener.

Here is an example of one of the above cards when I open it:

Unlike the first image, you can actually click on that one and see what shows up in my Scrivener program.

I can also save video and audio files there, so that any time I need to refer to them, they’re at my fingertips.

This is just so cool.

So if you have a Mac, check it out. Unlike a lot of similar programs out there, this demo is fully functional. You can create and save stuff. Unlike a lot of similar programs out there, this one is only $39.95 if you decide to buy it.

And it has a good forum with helpful people to provide answers if you don’t bother to read the documentation or do the tutorial need extra assistance.

And to top it off, there are also links to software programs for writers who use Windows. (Scroll down to the bottom.) That is because the gentleman who developed Scrivener is English which means he is by nature helpful and polite.

Colour me sold.

Rolls eyes.

I can’t believe I do these things.  Please, somebody else play along.  Let me know who you are. Otherwise, I feel so… lame.  (But cute. So damn cute.)

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Macs get all the cool stuff.

Toni told me about it first. And shared her frustration that it’s only for Macs. And I blew it off. You know, just a nice little package of gimmicks and aren’t there other similar programs out there and why would I want this if I’m so happy with my real 3×5s and I’ve been using MS Word since I bought my first Mac in 1984 (yes, THAT Mac) and bought my first MS Word 1.0 for $129.95. Especially when writing a novel, I think the idea of buying specific word processing software is silly. Word is truly enough. Really.

I still haven’t reconciled with not using Word but I succumbed to the siren song of “free software demo” and am currently exploring the pleasures of Scrivener.

Right now I’m loving the gimmick aspect–I love this corkboard on my screen that displays all the character images I’ve gathered for my new project. I thought I might print them out and make some sort of a collage like Jenny Crusie (scroll to bottom to see what I mean/link courtesy of Toni, again), but right now this is so much easier and I like it a lot.

About the corkboard. I know other screenwriting programs offer similar stuff, and if you use one that does what Scrivener does, please let me know because I have friends with PCs who are jealous, ya know. But I know I’ve seen lots of programs that allow you to do things similar to this:

That didn’t impress me much, seen it before, more or less. But for the first time ever, I’ve been collecting visual images to inspire/intrigue me while I’m writing, and I regret not being able to show you a pic of it*, but you can also import images, videos, audio, etc. to a Research corkboard. My corkboard is now covered with lovely images of locations and characters. When my new widescreen monitor shows up (one that actually works, this time) I’ll be abe to have the corkboard open while I’m working. And did I mention, my images are really lovely and wonderful and inspire me to write?

Or, here’s an image from the Scrivener site that shows somebody with a single image open with their work, rather than an entire corkboard.

Okay, yes, bells and whistles. Gimmicks, maybe. But this stuff, I love.

So, sorry if you don’t have a Mac and can’t get a lovely demo of your own to play with, and pay for (only $39.95) should you decide to keep it.

This won’t replace my 3×5s because I don’t want it to. I love my real 3×5s. But I’ll also dupicate them into this program, because yet another way of using it is to have the scene card open in the right panel while you’re writing, along with any notes you’ve made.

Scrivener. Check it out. If you have a Mac. Let me know what you think. Do you really use it, or did the fun/new wear off after awhile?

*There is also the issue that even if I could do a screenshot of my corkboard with images to show you how pretty it is, the fact is that these are all images I’ve saved off the internet and are the creative property of other people. And while I don’t feel guilty at saving them for my own use (it’s not like I could buy them anywhere) I don’t think I’m allowed to actually post them to my blog, either. Which is a crying shame, because I’ve got some gorgeous original art here. But, just imagine something gorgeous and lovely and pretend you can see it, okay?