Wouldn’t it be great if you could somehow automatically take a snapshot of your Scrivener novel’s content and automate daily or weekly back-ups from your Mac to another location? Using Automator, it’s actually really easy.
Preparation
The following example assumes you have Panic’s Transmit ftp software, which integrates well with Automator, to do backups to an FTP server. You can actually use Automator to backup files anywhere you want though — another directory, your iDisk, you name it.
Open Automator
Launch Automator (find it in your Applications folder), scroll down the left column (Library) to find and select Transmit, grab the “Synchronize Files” action from the middle column (Actions) and drag it over to the workflow area on the right. Drag in other automator actions as appropriate. Following are some screenshots (click on the thumbnail to enlarge) to show you how I set up my backup workflow.
Here are the workflow steps you will need by the time you are done.
Add a ‘Get Specified Finder Items’ step. Here select your working Scrivener file. You can backup other files at this step as well.
Feed these files into a ‘Create Archive’ step. This will archive your files into a .zip folder.
You will want to have a separate copy of the backup each time you save. This gives you a version control system where you can always find versions of the file from days or weeks ago should you ever delete something and then not discover it till some time later! Add a ‘Rename Finder Items’ step and configure it to add the date to the filename.
Add another ‘Rename Finder Items’ step and configure it to add the time to the filename (this allows us to have multiple backups in one day).
Add the Transmit option to ‘Upload Files’ and configure it to the FTP server of your choice (or use Stronghold, cf. …). Here you could instead copy the files to another disk attached to your Mac if you prefer.
Run a test to see if things work. You hit the play button near the top right corner of the Automator window, watch Transmit open up, connect to your FTP server, change to the correct directory, change the local path to the correct directory, then start uploading the Scrivener file. Once it’s done, it disconnects and closes Transmit. Perfect!
Running Backup On Demand
Save this Automater script to your Desktop (or wherever you like) choosing the “Application” file format, saving the file as BackupScrivener.app This creates a clickable application on your desktop that will launch the back-up whenever you like. You can also add this script as a plugin to your scripts menu so that you can backup right from your Mac’s main menu.
Scheduling
Let’s say you want to schedule BackupScrivener.app to run automatically daily.
Open up iCal (yes, iCal!), and for the sake of clarity, create a new calendar (File > New Calendar) called “Scheduled Tasks”. Create a new event for this coming Friday “Scrivener Backup” with the following details:
- scheduled for 11am
- set to repeat daily (ending “Never”)
- an alarm that opens BackupScrivener.app 0 minutes before the event
Here’s a screen shot of the event:
Every Friday at 11am (a time my computer is usually on, and I’m probably looking for a second cup of coffee) iCal will trigger the backup, backing up my novel to the server from my local disk.
Other Features
- This will work if iCal or Transmit are already open or closed, which is nice.
- You can drag in multiple File actions to one Automator workflow, so you can bundle all your weekly back-ups of different folders into one script and one iCal event, then make another one for daily or monthly tasks.
- It’s an Automator workflow, so you can do all kinds of stuff – ask for a confirmation before running, tell it to send you an email afterwards, run an AppleScript, open your Strongspace account in Safari, etc etc.
Thanks to Stronghold
I’m not sure I would have ever thought of combining Transmit, Automator and iCal like this – the credit goes to the Strongspace blog. Check out their article on backing up files to Strongspace if you don’t have an FTP server.
Looking at submission guidelines from a variety of CBA publishers at the Faith, Hope & Love website, it looks like 90,000 words is a good all-around target for a novel length. But you have to write more than 90k words to get 90k words.
I like Steven King’s axiom for 1st draft versus 2nd draft word counts:
2nd Draft = 1st Draft - 10%
So, to target 90,000 final draft words, write 100,000 words!
Finally, a (nearly) perfect novel writing tool. Scrivener software (still in beta) is a light-weight but innovative software tool exclusively for Macintosh users. You can download a beta version for free at http://www.literatureandlatte.com. Click on the thumbnail images for full screenshots.
Scrivener’s outlining and note card capability allow you to organize your novel. You can annotate and categorize content in ways to allow you to flexibly craft the outline to the way you write.
Scrivener also has a full-screen mode text editor that whose background color is an eyeball-friendly black. No distractions and a slim column complete this optimized environment for the serious writer.
A great summary of how every novel should begin:
As far as beginning the novel in general, I think the surest formula (regardless of genre) goes something like this:
1. Grabber first sentence
2. Provocative first paragraph. This can range all the way from high action to quiet narrative, but it should (A) impart pieces of compelling knowledge while (B) giving rise to multiple intriguing questions.
3. First pages of continued high interest in present story (not jumping to a backstory scene), leading to
4. Inciting incident at end of chapter, with final
5. Hook
Full article at Forensics & Faith
A great resource including printable template:
One of the oldest tools in the arsenal of writers is the modest and unassuming index card. It’s used for jotting notes, sharing phone numbers, creating bibliographies, capturing ideas, making lists, and —heck— even making indices. (Who would have thought?) But one of its primary uses, especially for people structuring stories, is in creating a plot outline. A pen, a table top, and a small stack of cards are all that’s needed to turn a mish-mash of incongruent or half-baked ideas into a plot that’s tight, logical and well-developed.
Have you ever come up with a concept for a story, video or presentation, but didn’t know how to begin?
Read full article at D*I*Y Planner.
I ran across this post from Dave Long on a non-contrived way to describe prayer.
The prayer that follows is in narrative form. This is very important, I
feel. Too often, writers feel compelled to put prayer into dialogue. It
is spoken out loud or in the mind, but it comes out word for word.
Personally, I feel this misses the point of prayer, which isn’t
necessarily the words said, but what is truly meant. Narrative allows
the meaning of the prayer, what God hears, to be shared with the
reader. It’s a nice little trick and ends up sounding less stilted and
more substantial than words that are spoken. See this portion from the
book:
She began at the beginning. She prayed for forgiveness for defying her father in marrying Teddy. Her father loved her, that was all, and he hadn’t wanted her to move so far away. She
had done it blithely, sure her father would come around, but he never had….
This is just a small example. Yvette continues praying, eventually getting to her guilt. Then, the supernatural:
She had just finished praying, still high from Maria-Jose’s Chesterfield,
when she felt at once the heaviness of what she had undertaken to keep
from Teddy, and a rushing upward in the top of her head. She caught her
breath, and looked down, and saw her own kneeling figure at the window
below. She could study the part in the dark hair on the top of her
head: it was a little crooked. She no longer felt the aching in her
knees—she no longer felt anything. She willed her body to look up, but
it stayed in the attitude of prayer, while she floated above.
It’s a small moment, and precisely rendered. The detail of looking at the part in her hair, tells us all we need to know of her perspective. The whole thing lasts a few moments and then Yvette seeks out the Mother
Superior to help her understand what happens. The nun’s response is to tell Yvette never to do that again, which confirms the mysticism of the moment, tingeing it with power and danger. Throughout her life Yvette
returns to that moment as a true spiritual experience.
Full article here at Faith*In*Fiction
Evangelicals get the lion’s share of coverage in the CBA market. But what about Roman Catholic fiction? Flannery O’Connor and J.R.R. Tolkien are two notable writers whose Catholic identity is integral to their writing. Other Catholic literature is finding mainstream distribution.
This is a VERY cool technique to take notes on books without actually writing within the book, dog-earing pages, etc.
I thought I might as well document one of my little “life hacks”.
1. When I start a new book I stick a few post-its on the first page inside the cover. That way there’s always some paper around to write notes on.
2. When I fill up a post-it I move it, either to the inside back cover or the inside front cover.
3. The added benefit of using post-its is that when I come to type up the notes (so I never lose them and can search them), the post-its stick handily to the side of the monitor.
Another trick I’ve adapted to the above is writing the page number on the Post It if there is a paragraph I particularly liked. I’ll sometimes photo copy the pages I note on the Post It after I’m done with the book and file it for reference.
The publishers of Catholic books are a tighter, closer community that what you find in the general CBA market. Here are some helpful tips on Catholic publishing with insights into unique characteristics of the Catholic book publishing world.
Read more: Catholic Book Publishing
A nice interview with book reviewer Tim Frankovich on Christian Fantasy on the INsites blog:
read the article
(4.00 out of 5)