David Sparks:

Scrivener was designed for writing fiction. But it turns out to be a great tool for business writing, too. 

I've been flailing around with different writing tools recently, iAwriter, Byword, NValt, etc. etc. etc.

They all offer distraction free writing, plus markdown support, of which I am a big fan.

But they don't help me with my root problem, which is keeping track of all the stuff I'm writing.  In fact, I'm becoming quite a bit more prolific thanks to these tools, which makes the whole problem worse.  All this stuff I'm writing is getting dropped all over my digital floor and desktop.  After a few months of some fairly heavy brainstorming and writing, I am ashamed to say, I don't even know what I've written or where to find it.

I've always known about Scrivener and its pricetag has kept me from adding it to the growing list of apps that I've tried for writing.

But after reading this post from David Sparks, I think this might be worth a shot.

David Sparks:

If you want to brainstorm a bunch of ideas, then pull them into some kind of organized shape, and you want to do that from almost anywhere with almost any kind of hardware, you need apps that work with OPML.

I haven't quite got my head around this one yet, but I'm pretty sure it is profound.

With the final stages of launching a service product and publishing platform, comes lots of writing.  More writing than I've had to do in a very, very long time.

I'm essentially writing a book.

Now when I write anything longer than a blog post, and actually have to save it in an actual file, organizationally, I'm lost.  Or more accurately, the file is lost.  I have never needed strong organization in my computing life, and therefore I've never wired myself to think that way.

Now I'm suffering.

Even getting my thoughts organized, I do use mindmaps, but those are scattered around in various folders.

I'm a mess.

Help me David Sparks.  I'm now digging through your stuff.