fredart : blogbits

An odd thing about writing, at least for me, is that most of my best ideas come when i am working on other things. The past few weeks have been really good from a creative standpoint. Putting it all down in a usable form is not so easy, of course.

I’ve ben working quite a bit with Scrivener to zero in more tightly on better writing methods, a better ability to put in information, ideas, etc. Organize and reorganize them as needed to adjust to changes in story details and/or direction. Not so easy considering how my brain works, but i’ve been making progress. The hardest thing to get used to in Scrivener was to break things down into as many scrivenings as possible. I was doing entire scripts in one scrivening, but the way others seem to do it is give each panel its own scrivening, which makes it easier to move things around, and to use some auto numbering… you get the idea.

A few other things i’ve been playing with include Google Notebook, which seems to be remarkably convenient (we’ll see how well it works for me and if i keep using it). i’ve tried Yojimbo and DevonThink but the clipping aspects of them are still somewhat akward for me - yojimbo would work great if you could drag and drop firefox pages to it and have the title of the item match the title of the webpage instead of just the raw URL (this works in going from Safari to Yojimbo but not Firefox to Yojimbo - can’t really figure out why). I collect a lot of random data and bits that i can never seem to find when i need them, so i’m hoping that some sort of clipping/data and indexing program will help. I am probably going to experiment with Yojimbo more… I’ll let you know how it goes.

I’ve also been using del.icio.us for my bookmarking since the beginning of the year. I wont link to it yet because… i dunno, i hide links or things that i dont want shared, and there’s nothing there i really don’t want people to see, but there is this weird sense that people can build a sense of your thoughts by looking at what you are bookmarking. That’s not a problem, really, but when you are a writer… do you really want people following what you are bookmarking and looking at?

The other thing, the real challenge and the secret to using bookmarking like this well is becoming adept and organized at properly tagging things. The biggest problem with tagging is that you really dont get a sense of what works well until you have been tagging for a while. Revising your tagging schema after the fact is NOT easy, at least not with any of the tools that i’ve seen so far, which is really surprising.

Tagging is talked about a lot as a powerful way of managing data, but there are so few decent tools that seem to focus on how to work with and revise your approach to tagging after you start to get a better sense of what works best for you. You can have all your new tags up to snuff, but the stuff already in there… who has time to go thru and edit every bookmark they have taken in the past year? Where’s the data management tools and rule-based search and change functions to aggregate and combine similar tags? where are the tools that let you look at the structure of your tagging and see where you have redundant tagging and where you are lacking refined tags? Maybe it’s just me.

For now, my data collection and management is more organized than it used to be in the past for me - urls dragged to the desktop and dumped into a ‘websites’ folder. This is much better.

Oh, and if you are newer mac user and are looking for some of the great aps to experiment with, here’s a really great list of what really are some of the best aps for macs. Have fun.