my progress bar

Here's today's progress bar from my Scrivener program.

This little doohickey is incredibly motivating and reinforcing, although when you go into word deficit by cutting sections things can get hairy, motivation-wise.

Say you start a writing session by cutting a thousand words. The Session target bar doesn't count anything you write until you've made up the lost thousand. Scrivener needs to create a Session target for revising & cutting.

The first chapter of Temple's & my new book was huge....was it 60 pages? 80? I've forgotten. It was so out of control that our editor told me not to revise it until I'd revised all the other chapters. That way I'd know what needed to stay and what could go.

So that's what I did, and when I finally re-read the first chapter, a year after I'd written it or thereabouts, I was aghast. What a mess --- what a long-winded, barely comprehensible, almost psychotically verbose mess!

I went at that thing with a buzz saw.

After our editor read it, she called and said, "You cut that thing to pieces."

She sounded surprised. Surprised and happy.

Scrivener needs a doohickey that rewards and reinforces reductions in Word Count.