Goodbye pencil ... Goodbye paper

After spending a few hours reading the Scrivener tutorial and then watching an introductory video, I decided to jump right into the software. Gone are the days of capturing my story ideas using pencil and paper (old receipts, napkins, envelopes, you get the point ...) These days I use Dragon Dictation, which I installed on my iPad. What a relief it is not having to turn on the light and grab a pencil and paper in the middle of the night. Now, I simply open my iPad, tap the Dragon app, and begin speaking ... but I digress.

Back to Scrivener. I emailed all my notes from Dragon to myself and transferred all the pages to Scrivener, using cut and paste. Once that was done, I compiled and exported a rough initial draft of my newest story idea in PDF format for review. I might have chosen RTF format for Word; however, I am weeks away from that step.

I soon realized that I needed to add another tool to my arsenal in my quest to capture all my story ideas sans pen and paper on my iPad and then seamlessly incorporate the notes into Scrivener on my laptop. My first choice was Index Card (an iPad app I downloaded for 4.99.) I played around with it for a few hours and found that I like it. Projects are built using the corkboard and outline structure as in Scrivener. However, I do not own a MAC ... yet, and so I still had to use cut and paste to transfer the RTF output from Index Card into Scrivener.

After checking the prices of a few MacBook Pros on Amazon, I quickly determined it might be best to look for another iPad app. Upon subsequent Google searches, I have read promising reviews of an app called SimpleNote. I think I will give it a try.

I also read that Scrivener is developing an iPad app for release sometime in 2012. I can't wait!