The Last Day of Waiting

Tomorrow is December (in Australia). Tomorrow is the day I get to the ‘prize’ I worked for in NaNo – the Scrivener discount (50% – woohoo!). I know, I know, not really a prize at all, because I still have to pay for it, but it’s less, considerably less, and if you take into account things like exchange rates, it does make a big difference.

This is my last day of waiting for it – and I’ve checked every day just in case they gave the code out early! I want to move my snippets of the new story into the ‘home’ folder with its corresponding stuff – which is so much less now, because I can put it all in the open document while I’m working. That last section should all be in very loud italics.

I didn’t realise how annoying it was to have to open documents (sometimes as many as six or 7) and trying to flick between them to get info, or having scrabbles of notes all over my desk and riffling through them to find that one little bit of spark I wrote down while sleepwalking. All that stuff now goes into little bits of the main document and all it takes it one click, read or copy or revise, one more click and I’m back at work.

No changing between documents and then trying to find my way home, no losing my place, no crashing of Word because too many docs are open (and therefore, no more of those ‘auto-saved’ which one do you want to keep? messages).

Today is the last day of waiting, and even though I’m tight with my money (I say frugal, others say differently), this is going to be worth it in terms of sanity saving.

Maybe it means I can get more work finalised, and I don’t have to crack a wobbly when the Word stuff hits the fan (as it used to do at least once every day!). It’s such a waste of time to have an emotional tirade in the middle of a work period. Big intake of breath, and as my favourite character would say, “Oh, well.” (Not quite, but close.)

Am I impatient? You betcha bottom dollar! I’ve spent the last few years (since 2013) learning the craft associated with story-telling for a larger market than the foster kids. It hasn’t been easy, it’s been a lot of effort, a lot of desperation and soul-searching. I think it’s worth it. I think I can be good enough.

Now I want the tool to help me be not just more productive, but also less concussive – unless it’s in the habit of crashing a few times a day. And I’ve done some reading on the world wide web for instances of this. I have. I research. I look for the shit that hits the fan on products.

You can take it that I didn’t find (enough) to stop me getting up at oh-dark-hundred (occasionally referred to as sparrow-fart) tomorrow morning and getting a fully-fledged Scrivener Code for the discount and downloading it and Working the whole day knowing I can use this thing Forever and Ever and never have to have a wobbly again (I have the toes crossed, but that’s nothing).

So, that’s my piece for the day, my snippet of information. A day late (because I got 12k words done on the new story!).

Next update on Sunday, and then maybe I’ll give you a snippet of what I’m working on. Maybe. [ Are we close enough to Christmas that I can say ‘If you’re good.’ ? – mind you, I never did say that to the fosters, so maybe not. ]