Musical Chapters

I've been writing this book for, no joke, about five years. This is the third or fourth iteration, and it's coming back to the spirit of what it was when I first wrote it.

Every time I "fix" it, I end up moving the chapters around. This has made it horrendous for my alpha readers, who receive a new copy and start reading it and marking it up with comments like "Why is this the first time we've heard the name of this town?" when what they're reading is something like the third paragraph of the first chapter, it's just that when they received it, it was actually the third paragraph of the FOURTH chapter, and I took out all the earlier references to the cat.

I'm eternally grateful to my alpha readers, but I have to admit that it's a little taxing to sift through the comments and having to stop and think about whether this or that nitpick is still even relevant. I wish there was a way to instantly and automatically reflow the copies of everyone who's reading it, as I'm updating things.

But there's not. I'm currently working in Storyist, a novel- and screenplay writing software for the Mac. It's got some cool features, like the ability to drag pictures onto your character sheets and then have those character sheets sitting at the edge of your screen so that you can keep track of your characters. It formats everything for you and displays your chapters, sections, etc., in a column on the left. This means that it's already indexed once you're done and you don't have to do anything fancy to be able to move quickly from this part of the book to the next. It exports to Word or .pdf, too. Yay.

Until there's instantaneous transmission, I'll just gratefully wade through the comments and be happy that someone's willing to read my drivel before it's done.