I wrote here back in August of how I’d moved my fiction writing to the wonderful and ridiculously inexpensive authors’ word processor Scrivener. But that was when I’d just completed the seventh Costa book, which was begun in Pages. Now I am starting from scratch, and determined to set up Scrivener to handle the task from start to finish.

This required a little bit of thought and organisation. One of Scrivener’s strengths is that it encourage you to view a project at both micro and macro levels, zooming into the minutiae, then out again to see the bigger picture. You can split and reconnect chapters at will, move stuff around in an instant, rework, reshape, edit, add… The freedom is an utter joy, but there are still practicalities, and one of them is this: chapter numbering.

In the last project I never really got the hang of this so I did the job manually, which is a real pain. How do you do it in Scrivener? It’s there in the manual, but somehow I missed it. I’ve whinged a bit about the internet of late, but let’s not think it’s all bad. All too often big companies use the web as a way to hide from their responsibilities to their customers, while small ones seize upon it as a way of delivering a degree of backup we could never have expected before.

Scrivener is a one-man band. The talented chap behind it doesn’t even do software for a living. Ergo, the support naturally beats the hell out of anything one might expect from the likes of Microsoft. When I posted my query - which was, I emphasise, answered in the manual, and I should have seen it there - I had a full and useful answer within hours. You can see the entire support thread here. Note, too, the size of the Scrivener community that has grown up around this product, one in which experienced members leap in to help newcomers, sparing poor Keith, the chap who started this in the first place, a little of the pain.

Once my eyes had been opened it took a moment to see how it would all work with my own project, and I’m now happily convinced I can handle the whole of this next book, including all revisions, inside Scrivener, only exporting to Word when I want to send stuff to the publisher. I’ve been waiting for something like this for years.