Above World, my work-in-progress, is the first project I’ve written using Scrivener.
I absolutely loved it for keeping all my files together — all the web pages, photos, snippets, quotes, etc. Being able to keep a photo of a shark next to the chapter with a shark fight was invaluable! World-building in general was a lot more fun, and far easier to reference. When I got to the second and third drafts, being able to quickly jump to chapters from previous drafts proved very useful. I never got confused about where I was or which version I was working on.
After finishing Draft 3.0 (more or less), I exported the whole thing to a Word file and spent a good 30 minutes cleaning it up. Not hard at all!
Except now I’d like to make a few more tweaks. Maybe add a paragraph here and there, change a few words, that sort of thing. How do you other Scrivener users handle that? Do you make the changes in Scrivener and re-export the chapters you change, or do you make the changes in Word and let the version in Scrivener get out of date? Is there some synchronization feature I’m missing for this?
I am all about efficiency paths, but I can’t find one in this process. I would love to hear how you manage it.
Jenn — you probably don't want hear how I use Scrivener, because it's pretty ridiculous. Since I use a PC laptop as well as my iMac, I usually end up compiling a draft just about every day, and exporting it to Word. Then if I make any changes, I copy and paste 'em back into Scrivener from Word.
At some point, I'll get a iBook and make things much easier on myself… But I don't want to give up Scrivener, because of the way I can organize my notes and reminders. If only it was available on a Windows machine…
I keep imagining I’ll try Scivener, but so far, I’m still slave to Word.
Jenn, I tend to do my first and second drafts on scrivener, then move it to word and stay there for the third and final edit. Like Mike, I move between the mac world and the PC world. Once I put it into the pc world, there it stays, though I must say I keep my other one open and at the ready for ease of reference.
I could only wish there was a sync ability…