You know that feeling when you have what you think is a great idea? The one that seemed such a fabulous idea at the time? The one that is now about to come back and bite you? Yes, that one!

I had one of those ideas. The idea was to demonstrate Scrivener for the MacBites After Hours show … seems harmless enough doesn’t it? Don’t believe it! Scrivener is the most fantastic application for writers. It excels at supporting writing of any kind, BUT to effectively demonstrate even a small percentage of its features you actually have to write something! I know it’s shocking that isn’t it? 🤣

Anyway, that was the genesis of what has now become #Blog30. The plan is to publish a new post every day in November and you can follow along with detailed behind the scenes sneak peeks at the creation process via the MacBites After Hours shows.

November is traditionally NaNoWriMo month and while I have no desire to write a novel the buzz around the writing community is infectious and I usually do undertake a specific content creation project in November. This year that project is #Blog30

We started the process in MacBites After Hours 0044 when I gave a detailed introduction to the features of Scrivener. This included a detailed demonstration of what Scrivener Snapshots are and how you can use them. A demonstration that prompted much positive feedback from viewers.

In MacBites After Hours 0045 I built the file I’ll be using for the entire #Blog30 project. It was built from scratch which gave me the opportunity to show how to construct a Scrivener file to best help and support you in a writing project. It also served to show how features available in the pre-built templates that ship with Scrivener were made.

One of my favourite features to include in any writing project is a writing journal. It feels really unnatural to document your thoughts, decisions and processes as you work through issues in your project but believe me it’s one of the most valuable additions you can make. Your future self will thank you for taking the time to both add the mechanism to keep a journal and investing the time to keep it updated.

MacBites After Hours 0046 saw the original file refined to accommodate the upcoming project. I took the time to create Custom Metadata, for tracking the publication date of the posts, and explain the power of Bookmarks, to track the final published URL of each post.

MacBites After Hours 0047 is tomorrow and will include the behind the scenes process of creating this first post, the second post for tomorrow and the plan for the upcoming week.

I hope you will join me in this project or at least follow along with my progress and share your thoughts on the topics included throughout the 30 days of the #Blog30 project.