Stephen Zeoli
3/6/2012 6:51 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.)
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.)