Memoirs of an English Major

“A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life” - John Milton  

    Over the course of the past two weeks, I have written and created four separate drafts on my short story, each one longer that the last. I’m fine with the word length, but I feel if I make one more revision, it may become longer that I had originally intended, so I am stopping at this moment with my final draft. I will make a couple of grammar checks and pacing revision, but as of now, the short story is complete. Once the contest is over, I will repost the story here so that all can read. It’s been a great process and I really couldn’t have written as I have without the use of PageFour. It is a great piece of software. It just works for me as a writer.

     As a writer, I tend to stub numerous parts of a work, mainly because at the moment I am writing, I may not have all the  words quite right in my head and I only have a small section ready to write down. Perhaps I have the perfect ending, but not the intro or the best portion of dialogue, but not the paragraph to establish the characters. With Page Four’s notebook format, it makes it easy to create pages quickly, without the whole hassle of making a new document and sort them in any structure you want.

   Possibly one of it’s better feature for drafts is its snapshot feature which captures the state of a page to a set of files, allowing you to look at previous revision and, if you so choose to, roll back to a previous backup. This feature feels like the equivalent of Rails Migrations for my writing and I love it. I’ve captured each one of my drafts to a separate snapshot and it is faster and easier than saving multiple files. Plus, with its tabbed interface,I can quickly open a file and begin writing. It keeps a light footprint and boots up quickly.

   There is one small feature I would love to have on the software and that’s full page editing. It’s not that I find the interface distracting. It’s actually one of the cleanest interfaces I’ve seen on record. It’s just that I wish it had this function just to make everything disappear, but the lack of it doesn’t hinder the software.

  Overall, I am thrilled with the product and I will purchase it this week. It is well worth a try for anyone on the Windows side of things looking for a great piece of software to write in. I’ve already recommended it to my fellow writing friends and encourage anyone who is looking for a piece of software that adapts to your writing style than you to adapt to its. Curious to see what anyone else thinks of Page Four, or if there is anything else on the PC side of things like this. I know the mac has Scrivener, but I’m wondering if there is anything else worth checking out?