My Favorite Barnes & Noble

A decade or more ago, I use to travel to Oxnard, California. And when I had some time, I'd travel just north of that area to what seemed like the edge of the world because the Ventura farmlands would take over from there. On that edge was a two-story Barnes & Noble. I have no idea if it is still there. But back then it was still crowded with people. I'd end up in the Arts & Architecture section as usual and get the newest books that were out.

I haven't been to a Barnes & Noble in years now. Empty bookstores give me the creeps for some reason.

Venture Bros. Canceled

I didn't know until recently that Venture Bros. had any relationship with Warner Bros. So ya it would make sense that if the WB is going away, that the VB would go away as well.

I have all the seasons on DVD. I first watched the show on MTV in 2003, I think. It was so bizarre that I became hooked right after. But MTV made it hard to catch later episodes at a consistent time. So I waited until seasons were pressed onto DVD and binge-watched the show that way. Years would go by, wondering when the next season of Venture Bros. would get posted on Amazon.

Anyway, Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer did a fantastic job of writing the VB genre. Which was Johnny Quest meets Marvel Comics in the '60s. Their world-building was phenomenal.

About

I parked this fiction blog of mine here years ago with the idea that one day I'd give it a go at writing fiction. Not any kind of "great novel" that I was told about in the 8th grade, but some kind of fiction at least. Any kind. From the three genres. But mostly fictional-wise.

The other day I was watching some YouTubers discussing over a mind map. They were hammering out ideas for a graphic novel and producing a comic script, which is basically a screenplay, for it. I noticed that the software they were using was Final Draft (which I still need to buy at some point, maybe this evening). One of the members in chat had mentioned that they used Scrivener for doing their comic scripts.

After some searching on the Internet, I found Scrivener's online store. It looked amazing. The program organizes your story ideas into a working draft of the book you are writing. The price was cheap. It had a sister program called Scapple, which was even cheaper. Scapple is used for creating just mind maps that can be imported into Scrivener.

One slight problem with Scrivener though is that it does not produce a finished manuscript of your work. You will still need a word processor to do your finished copy. Some people use Word. My copy of Word is twenty years old and doesn't work with Windows 10 anymore. I do have OpenOffice, however, that I can blow the dust off of and have it do some work for me. It uses the .ODT format that Scrivener uses. And Scrivener also writes out using the Final Draft format. But I doubt it is totally compatible with the latest version of Final Draft. That's one of the problems of softwares being updated constantly. They can talk to each other for about six months.

Anyway, I'll be using this blog to show off any works in progress of my writings. And to show any tips that I've learned while using Scapple and Scrivener.