Charlie StrossFeb 13, 2025

Time for a footnote to this: nearly 40 years of writing my stories on computers has taught me two things:

1. Always have backups. More than you think you need, too (backups can go bad).

2. Always have an exit strategy from a hardware, operating system, or writing software choice: vendors can go bad or remove support for older products.

Sub-footnote: Linux isn't an exit strategy, it's a 9-5 job. Open source is less bad than closed, but rug-pulls are still possible.
https://wandering.shop/@cstross/113995800386923701

Charlie Stross (@[email protected])

Time for Day 13 of #WritersCoffeeClub , many thanks to @johnhowesauthor . How do you organise your writing projects? I work in Scrivener. One project per novel. Possibly supplementary notes in SimpleNote, before I import them into Scriv when I begin writing. Each project lives in a folder along with supplementary stuff, namely generated drafts in export file formats, backups, and so on. Current "live" projects temporarily reside in a separate folder in my Dropbox (for cross-device syncing).

The Wandering Shop
Show threadkdgregory

@cstross Do you use text-based markup as an exit strategy?

Or is Scrivener's internal format well documented and simple enough to translate? (or does it even have its own format? Wikipedia seemed to indicate it supported multiple 3rd-party formats)

Feb 13, 2025 at 3:21pmWeb
Show threadCharlie StrossFeb 13, 2025
@kdgregory Yes and Yes. Internally, a Scriv project is: a folder hierarchy (backups are a zip) containing rtfd documents (Apple's embrace-and-extend on Microsoft RTF, with added rich content support) and some XML metadata. But I export as markdown, too. @scrivenerapp is created by a small business with n > 1 programmer, and I've been using it for close to 17 years at this point: it doesn't update often.