Editing Butterfly in Scrivener, Part 2

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Once I started using Scrivener it became obvious that it could do a number of things that I was using several other programs to accomplish. Here’s an example. In an earlier post, A Milestone, I mentioned one method used to keep track of which characters were in what scenes, and how often they were appearing …

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Genesis of If a Butterfly – Part 5

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Originally posted on Michael Runs the Gamut on December 10, 2013 The Plot Thickens (A Little) In the last post I established that I thought my cast of characters was complete, but was it? They were all lined up neatly on the butterfly’s route (a teacher in Canada, a rock deejay in Virginia, a scientist …

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Genesis of If a Butterfly – Part 4

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Originally posted on Michael Runs the Gamut on December 7, 2013 [Comments from 2021 are in italics, enclosed in square brackets, like this one.] Okay, by this time I had six main characters (a lot to juggle, I know), but with NaNoWriMo just weeks away at this point, my biggest worry was finding a way …

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Genesis of If a Butterfly – Part 3

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Originally posted on Michael Runs the Gamut on December 3, 2013 More Decisions In the last post, I talked about the idea of constructing the plot of If a Butterfly around a Monarch butterfly, on its annual migration from Canada to Mexico, interacting with characters who happened to be in its path. The original idea …

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Genesis of If a Butterfly – Part 2

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Originally posted on Michael Runs the Gamut on November 30, 2013 Decisions, Decisions In the previous post, I talked about how the idea for If a Butterfly originally formed. It was early-fall 2003, and I had been trying to develop a plot idea for NaNoWriMo, which was then about two months away. I had a …

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Genesis of If a Butterfly – Part 1

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Originally posted on Michael Runs the Gamut on November 26, 2013 [Comments from 2021 are in italics, enclosed in square brackets, like this one.] The Very Beginning If a Butterfly was the first novel I finished. ** I started it in November of 2003, and didn’t finish it until October of 2012. This doesn’t mean …

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Trimming the Beast Down – Part 1

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Originally posted on Michael Runs the Gamut on September 15, 2012 [Comments from 2021 are in italics, enclosed in square brackets, like this one.] When I finished the second draft of If a Butterfly, about eleven weeks ago [early-summer 2012], it was 280,762 words and 1,093 double-spaced pages. After I returned from the 2012 WLT …

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A Milestone

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Originally posted on Michael Runs the Gamut on July 25, 2012 [Comments from 2021 are in italics, enclosed in square brackets, like this one.] For the past year or so people have been asking, “How’s your book coming?” referring to my novel. If a Butterfly. I had usually been telling them that the first draft …

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