After all the usual shilly-shallying, excuses, work avoidance routines and pathetic bleating, I've finally got down to writing the new book, the one which should be with you in 2013. It has a title, a couple of characters, a 'canvas' by which I mean the world which will enclose it, and a thematic thread that is supposed to kick the narrative into action.

This will, I should say here, be a standalone novel, not an episode in the Costa series. I need to break the rhythm now and again and this seems a good time to do so. But it will mainly be set in Italy, though most of the protagonists are not Italian. Thus far I can go...

Now to some practicalities...

<!--more-->I first set pen to paper (can we really say that any more?) ten days or so ago. I began this week with 5,488 words in the pot. I end it with 15,428. Ten thousand words in a week is pretty solid going. It doesn't mean this project will be plain sailing throughout. I very much doubt that will be the case. It rarely is. But it shows the project's caught my imagination.

Part of the writing process is uncovering the story hidden in your own head (for me anyway). Progress on this scale so early on seems to indicate there's something there to be excavated. As usual at this stage I have a few ideas...
<ul>
	<li>Some scenes that lie ahead</li>
	<li>Some threads to be expanded</li>
	<li>A possible resolution</li>
	<li>Some characters to come</li>
	<li>A few twisty bits</li>
</ul>
All will, of course, change in the telling. It makes for extra work but I'd be very disappointed if they didn't. I'm the first traveller on this journey. I want to be engaged in it because if I'm not you won't be either.

The other major change is the 'workflow'. I started off thinking I'd write this book in Scrivener 2 on the Mac. I've now gone back to Windows and it's going a lot more smoothly. Why? It's nothing to do with Scriv 2 which is a tremendous piece of software. But I suspect my mindset was already attuned to the idea of writing this book in Word 2010 with <a class="zem_slink" title="Microsoft OneNote" rel="homepage" href="http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/onenote/">OneNote</a> alongside for a book diary and reference material. I'd no idea Scrivener 2 would be out around the same time and look so great it would shout, 'Use me instead!'

Damned nearly did too. Scrivener is fantastic for developing and writing a narrative. But it has so many possibilities that I found myself being distracted from what is, in this case, a pretty linear story. If I was writing a complex book covering a lot of different points of view and eras it might be different. But this story feels more comfortable in Word for writing, on my main screen, and with OneNote on a separate left hand screen for research, notes and that essential book diary for jotting down thoughts and ideas.

I have to say: the more I use OneNote the more I enjoy it. The thing has a bit of a learning curve to begin with. It either looks too simplistic or too complex depending on how you approach matters. But once you have the hang of its working methods you realise how wonderfully simply and powerful it is: diary, research database, outliner, ideas pad all in one.

Here's a little look at one page from the thirty or so in my project notebook, a very early book diary.

<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/capture.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-large wp-image-6319" title="OneNote" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/capture.jpg?w=640" alt="" width="640" height="466" /></a>

It's just one page in a notebook devoted to the project (which as you can see I've been prevaricating over since last May). Other pages cover characters, locations, research and a few rather arcane subjects that will be special to this book. Those yellow stars are things I think are important. You just hit Ctrl-2 and the star appears. It's simple enough to get a list of all such tags in the sidebar, covering the entire project. Oh -- and to put a date on an entry you just hit Alt-shift-D.

OneNote is such a practical piece of software. It saves automatically and my notebooks sync through the free <a class="zem_slink" title="Windows Live Sync" rel="homepage" href="http://sync.live.com/">Windows Live Sync</a> services so they, and the Word manuscript, are backed up and kept up to date across my desktop and laptops.

This way of working really appeals to me. I like being able to split left brain practical stuff from right brain creativity. I found myself trying to compress both into one Scrivener document and it didn't fit so well. Doubtless Scrivener fans will find some way of managing that for themselves. But we all work differently. There are no universal right or wrong ways to create a book. Only the way that works for you.

And for now this definitely does seem to be working. I'll let you know if it continues to do so.