Right - this is my last word on Scrivener 2 today. I am <em>so</em> hacked off with this company. Word 2010 is great, Windows 7 is fine. I have nice laptops. I'm a happy little author and the old MacBook Pro is sitting gathering dust.

And then they release Scrivener 2. Rats. It has devoured most of today and I am absolutely gobsmacked by how wonderful it is (and how the hell I can avoid writing the next book in it, even though there's 18 megs of research sitting in OneNote which does <em>not</em> run on the Mac).

Oh well my problem. Here, for those of you who've downloaded Scrivener 2, even for a trial, is a template for it reflecting my own working habits.

<!--more-->It includes an example of how to use the Collections feature (which this morning I found utterly baffling) for monitoring different points of view and story elements set in different eras.

<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/screen-shot-2010-11-03-at-18-16-49.png"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-6115" title="Collections" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/screen-shot-2010-11-03-at-18-16-49.png" alt="" width="241" height="167" /></a>

My own invention, the <a href="http://davidhewson.com/2009/09/09/the-best-scrivener-tip-ever-maybe/" target="_blank">unplaced scenes folder</a>, of which I am mighty proud.

<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/screen-shot-2010-11-03-at-18-17-03.png"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-6116" title="Unplaced scenes" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/screen-shot-2010-11-03-at-18-17-03.png" alt="" width="186" height="45" /></a>

Some custom folder for to-do, themes, characters and settings, some of which come with the basic novel template but have been slightly amended.

<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/screen-shot-2010-11-03-at-18-17-13.png"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-6117" title="Custom folders" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/screen-shot-2010-11-03-at-18-17-13.png" alt="" width="206" height="225" /></a>

Please don't think any of this is rocket science. It took about twenty minutes to create all this. You can do it to match your own working methods, honest. Or just tinker with what I've done here.

Please note though... tech support is something for the Scrivener forum. I ain't doing it. I'm too busy working out what to do with all that OneNote research for one thing.

You'll find the template for download below. There are brief instructions inside some of the entries. Read and play and I'm sure you'll get the idea.

It works in Scrivener 2.0 only -- nothing earlier, and not the Windows beta. It's available here as an ordinary Scrivener file you can open. If you want to save it as a template go to File, Save Template with it open. Have fun!

<a href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/105354/David%20Hewson%27s%20template.zip" target="_blank">David Hewson's Novel Template for Scrivener 2.0</a>