I downloaded a free trial of Scrivenerover the weekend and started playing with it. Some parts are confusing after a couple days (Why do I need a corkboard again?) but the features I have been using are probably going to lead me to buying the software after my 30 day trial.
When I wrote my last novel and started editing, I had to constantly scroll through 240 pages of text. Within 10 minutes of downloading Scrivener, I had 17 chapters all in their own files. 20 minutes later, I had all of my feedback also imported into individual files that related to each chapter. By last night, I was writing notes to use as a reference to ensure foreign words spelled correctly and had research files for each character, including pictures of people I could use for inspiration and descriptions.
Even though I have heard of Scrivener numerous times before, I decided to look at its website up after reading some tweets by @phiala, one of my Twitter friends. I'm glad I did, because I'm thinking this Scrivener revolution means no more scrolling through hundreds of pages trying to make sure one word is spelled correctly the entire way through or tabbing through programs trying to find the one file I need to tell me whether my character's eyes are brown or blue.
The question isn't why I didn't download Scrivener before, it's why I was adamant about staying in Word.
