#bibisco

Does anyone have experience/recommendations for writing apps like Scrivener or Bibisco that have a web application and/or an Android app? I'm thinking I'd like to get away from Google Docs in the new year (the AI/user suggested corrections are driving me up the wall) but I do a non-zero amount of my writing while I'm on the clock at work (ssh!) and I can't exactly download Scrivener to the front office computer.

(I mean I could because upper leadership has absolutely fucked off and left my branch to fend for itself, but that seems like asking for trouble 😂)

Please note: I am not asking about things that run on iOS, as I do not own any Apple products and don't intend to.

Warning: I get really, really passionate about writing software.

If you are writing using Word or Pages or Google Docs or some knockoff of those because it's what you have always used, then don't fool yourself, you are fucking sabotaging yourself. They are designed for producing office publications. Not long-form writing, and not short stories. For the sake of not putting in some time to get the hang of something else, you are wasting so much time and effort fighting the software it's not funny. 

There are so many alternatives.

For long-form organisation of writing, I like Ulysses best, but it is subscription only now, which is a pain. (I like to buy outright). It's also Mac only, and my Macbook is unhappy. But it is so, so lovely, for writing, for document management, for everything. Minimalist AND full featured.

Scrivener is an outright purchase now, though, and is less ugly than it used to be. The note cards and outline view are awesome. It used to be my go-to before my conversion to writing in markdown. 

Bibisco is free/premium and is just a beautiful writing environment if you like to track characters, timeline and scenes and ALL THE DATA. 

For actual text production, I like clean, minimalist and Markdown. And there are SO MANY free or text editors. Also, they play much more nicely with AO3 than Word, Docs etc, because most can copy/paste in HTML. And some minimalist markdown software (like Ulysses) makes it trivial to make beautifully formatted .mobi, .pdf, .docx, .epub or whatever you want documents. Take that, Word and your stupid styles. 

Draft is the very best web-page text editor for collaboration, version control and beta-ing, and it's free, although I did choose to subscribe because it's simple, customisable and I use it every day. It also does great stuff like track when you are most productive.

For desktop, Typora is a WYSIWYG markdown text editor and is just so damn pretty and useful and thoughtfully designed. I love it so much I could die. And it’s FREE.

 On a phone, I like iaWriter (also has a desktop version and is good for collaboration) and Pure Writer (love the customisable soft keyboard taskbar). Train yourself to write on a phone, and you will never be without a way to fill spare moments. 

 Right now for longform original work, I write on a variety of minimalist markdown text editors according to mood, and will pop the chapters in Ulysses to export in manuscript form. 

 But find what you love best. Just don't stick with what you use at work/school because you are afraid to experiment.

Here are some links to start exploring.

https://alternativeto.net/software/scrivener/

https://alternativeto.net/software/microsoft-word/

So like, I was really disappointed because I went to the bookstore and they didn't have a single. Transgender. Book. At least that I could find. They carried them, but didn't stock any of them. I did find a lot of queer lit, but I wanted reference material for a character who is mtf and couldn't find anything besides this book. It has some tips on how to write a trans character but 😞 I really wanted to hear personal experiences. (I follow a lot of trans Youtubers, but they mostly talk about politics, not what it's like being trans.) Oh well, I'll get the digital editions on my Kobo. (Also, I'm uspet because the line at Starbucks literally went out into the road, so I had to go to a Target Starbucks and they didn't have matcha lattes 😭 Tragic.)

So in the 20 days since I’ve rounded up Cheap Thrill’s first part, I’ve spent a lot of time just having fun on Photoshop really!

I learned how to colour in pics and I’ve just been colouring anime girls right now,

I did this last night (just the colouring, I don’t own the pic!)

And I got two new writing programs! I forked out £13 for ZenWriter, which is beautiful and one of those “distraction-free” word processors. It has great music (that you can turn off if you’re not interested or prefer your own stuff), you add your own backgrounds and it looks so very satisfying. You can try it for free for 15 days though, really worth it.

A few things I will say though, is that if you copy and paste your writing into it, you will lose italics and anything underlined, the spellchecker isn’t fantastic and it saves everything as RTF files. However, for just writing up your work, it’s really nice and I’m very glad I paid for it.

The other program is Bisbisco, it’s free but not nearly as pretty as ZenWriter, and you have to pay $10 for the full version which allows you to do timelines and objects, but it’s character interviews are really useful for building new OC’s. They have all these helpful sections and ask questions that are actually relevant to majority of characters, like about social life, early life, psychology. etc. 

It has a lot of great features but I haven’t had the time to enter enough information to use them all yet. Things like architecture, locations, objects, chapters, timeline, analysis and an export option that you can use to change the type of document you finish it as.

But yeah, been a little busy, mostly working on WitchBoy (my original story that I’ve been world building for about 2 years) and trying out new things! 

I’ve decided I want to do a soft re-write of Cheap Thrills, whilst I’m working on the plot for the second part and Bella’s side story. I’m also considering posting it to AO3 too once I’ve fixed it up some. 

Solid meh for anyone writing spec-fic.

A lot of the data tracking features are nice, but to my great dismay, they get unwieldy if you have too many characters or places.

The lack of ability to subdivide categories for more easily sorting through large numbers discouraged me from putting my entire cast into the character tab. I don't want to swim through a sea of minor characters whenever I want to tag a scene with major ones. (Why can the tag menu not separate the major characters when it makes me distinguish major from minor in the characters menu?)

The locations menu also... doesn't sort by country? Why. Why, when your program has a built in function encouraging me to specify the country and city of every building I might create a page for would you then sort everything purely alphabetically by the name of the individual field or lake or meeting hall I might want to tag rather than, Iunno, creating subfolders for countries, like what it took me two seconds to set up for myself on Scrivener?

The sorting issues aside, if your story has more than a handful of locations or character to keep track of, then the stats menu just becomes too long and drawn out to really be worth reviewing. All in all, it feels like a lovely concept for people writing first world contemporary fiction and not for people writing epic fantasy or space opera or anything else with a lot of travel or a large cast. Supernatural romance set almost entirely in Forks, Washington might work well with it, but I'd hate to imagine trying to handle something like Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn in this sorting system. It would genuinely be less effort to just make individual doc or odt files for characters rather than use Bibisco at this point. Really, overwhelmingly, all of the features with no flexibility in how they're laid out feel intended for, like, small town romcom or thrillers or maybe a mystery novel contained to a few cities at most. I'm sure it's actually lovely for those, but if you're outside the genres this program feels intended for, a lot of its organizational features just aren't that nice.

Also giving the middle finger to second world fantasy and sci-fi: The text editor.

This is the TRUE main reason that I think I'd rather switch to writing in LibreOffice pages than jump to Bibisco if I must abandon Scrivener. The spell check! Scrivener's is no powerhouse either, but at least it can learn. It takes Bibisco a minute or two to accept any word I try to tell it is a word if that word lacks an apostrophe. This isn't even like a, "Haha, shlocky fantasy names with apostrophes" thing. I'm not talking about the Tel'e'brenequiettes of the world. Bibisco eventually accepted me telling it I hadn't misspelled Nathien, but after weeks it still tells me I'm wrong if I write Nathien's. This is my secondary protagonist and he cannot be indicated to possess anything or else spell check gets angry with me, and there is no way to make it stop.

You know what's not a made up name? Darien. (I didn't make up Isambard either.) Bibisco didn't recognize 'em, which meant it will never recognize Darien's or Isambard's names with an apostrophe S. Basically, fuck you unless you're sticking specifically to names that Bibisco already knows, which is only some real-person names and not all of them.

*sigh*

Thus far In not a fan of the lack of customization for sorting things. I'm sure I could get used to it, but I simply have never liked change. I know I'll dearly miss tracked changes the first time I do a manuscript revision if I do jump to the program. Don't understand why I can't use fonts tied in my computer for the program. (Oh dang--I bet it can't support Shavian.) I was also told it had a dark mode but F me if I can find it. I'd gladly pay for the full version for that before any of the other paywalled features. Shit's a life saver when I'm trying to finish a deadline with a headache, so it's making me nervous that I haven't found that yet. Dark mode was the main reason I upgrade to the newer Scrivener version.

And this program is actually really incredible. It got me starting to think about characters in a way that I never truly thought. I have been making characters since I was like five years old.

I recommend it. I haven't done much, just worked on character profiles, but it has almost everything I need in a software like this.