Diary of a non-fiction book: Work at last

Richard Cadbury (picture loaned to me by a member of the Cadbury family)

I’m so happy. I’ve finally found some time to write some actual words. I know my last post said that this post would cover reading and making notes, but this is such a landmark that I had to share it.

I’ve not done a great deal. I’ve had a few goes at setting Scrivener up how I want it, and each time I did it something happened and I had to reinstall it all over again and go back to the beginning.

I’ve had so much practise by now, though, that I’m doing it a lot quicker than I was. And I’ve learnt something else. I’ve learnt how to sort into alphabetical order. This makes me very happy as well.

The only thing I’ve added to the manuscript is a bibliography so far. I’d already prepared my “more about the author” page, but that was a straight copy-and-paste from another file.

Now I’ve listed a few of the books I’m going to be referring to. I do have some more, but I don’t want to add them until I know I’ve used them.

The other thing I did was set up Scrivener so that my chapter titles automatically showed in the compile. These are only as exciting as “Acknowledgements”, “Chapter x” and “Bibliography” at the moment. But I didn’t want to be typing them into the document when they are all already there in my binder on my chapter tabs.

I’ve just done a test compile … and it’s all working.

The book is currently 348 words … so only another 69,652 to go … But it’s still very exciting and I am content that work has begun.

Next
The next diary post really will cover reading and making notes.