As a geek, my first thought is, always, I Need An App to take care of this situation.

My writing machine is an eight year old Sony Vaio, one of those weird chopped-in-half laptops that has the CD, floppy, etc., in a separate docking station so as to reduce the weight of the main component. I’ve been running Ubuntu on it for at least a year now, and I love it. Clean, reliable, free, it appeals to my philosophy, my iconoclastic tendencies, and my budget. I HIGHLY recommend Ubuntu, and in most circumstances, Ubuntu plus Open Office (free office software that is the equal of Microsoft Office and can run on Windows) does everything I need.

Except.

This novel project is kicking my butt. And there is no Ubuntu app to help me.

Yes, I know about yWriter on WINE (didn’t work on my machine, dunno why) and Writer’s Cafe (ugliest interface on the planet) and Page Four on WINE (still no joy) and Freemind and a million other attempts, by me, to solve this problem. But I either can’t get them to work or they just don’t do what I need.

And anyway, what I really want is Scrivener. I want it really bad. I want it so bad I daily give serious consideration to the question: is there any way in hell I could rustle up a grand to buy a Mac and give up my beloved Linux?

Okay, after I stop panting, I try to think of other, non-$$$ solutions. I might try Liquid Story Binder on my Windows machine and if it is wonderful, see if I ought to (gasp!) put Windows back on my laptop. I could try running it on WINE, but chances are slim to none that it will work–as you can see, I haven’t had much luck with WINE the few times I’ve tried it.

And the whole thing amounts to spending more time thinking about how I am managing my writing, than time actually writing. Today anyway.

So, back to my legal tablets, notes files, highlighter codes (that I forget the meaning for), index cards, multiple files and copies of files, and versions, and back to the hair tearing and back to the hoping and praying that once I make a change, I am actually and successfully tracking it through the many twists and folds of the story and not missing any important bits, like whether character X is pregnant yet, or dead yet, or sleeping with character Y. Yet.