I write my books with Scrivener. I have since 2011. It has a daunting learning curve, and I feel like I used 10% of the features on my first book with it, and slowly gained maybe 2% per book. I’ve previously written posts here and here on tips and tricks. I’m not trying to make this a “make big money self-publishing your books!” blog, but I have a need to write this stuff down so I don’t forget it and can find it later. So, here’s another crop of answers for you. Caveat emptor: there are probably better or more preferred ways of doing this. I just beat things until they work.

OK, here we go, in no particular order.

Show the number of files in a folder in the binder

View > Outline > Show subdocument counts in binder. (There is also a View > Outline option at the top of the View menu, which is confusing.)

Show where the current scriv is in the binder

Navigate > Reveal in Binder. Or Cmd-Opt-R. Memorize that; I use it 50,000 times a day.

Exporting keywords

1. Create a blank text document.
2. Open the keywords (Project > Show Project Keywords, or Cmd-Shift-K)
3. Click the first one; shift-click the last one.
4. Drag them into the blank text document. This exports a comma-delimited text list of the keywords

Adding your own icons

1. Go to https://www.iconsdb.com and download a 32x32px PNG.
2. Right-click an item in the binder,
3. Change Icon > Manage Custom Icons, and add your PNG. Note the name in the menu will be the name from the PNG, so rename the PNG accordingly.

Wordpress import

• You can drag HTML files into the Research section of Scrivener, but not Draft.
• After they are dragged in, they are uneditable web archives. Go to Document > Convert > Web Page to Text
• There was a wp2epub plugin that would also do html, but it’s broken in new Wordpress versions, hasn’t been updated in 167 years.
• Tried WP2Static for this… it was slow so I stopped
• There was an XSL for this see https://www.literatureandlatte.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=34656&p=223492#p223492 but it no longer works, I get errors.
• This is horrible but you could export Wordpress to Jekyll…
• Another option: https://wordpress.org/plugins/aspose-doc-exporter/ - couldn’t get this to work
• wp2static - crashes
• I might have to do this again soon, so stay tuned.

The delete comment bug

If you add a comment to some text, then remove the comment and edit the text, the hyperlink text comes back, but with no attached comment

Workaround: highlight the text, delete the comment, cut the text, then Paste and Match Style it back.

Background image

Scrivener 3 - change the background image in compose mode: Project > Project Settings > Background Images (this moved since 2)

Searches and collections

You can turn on and off viewing collections with View > Hide Collections and View > Show Collections. Normally I turn them off because it drives me nuts to have them there and waste space in the binder.

But, here’s how you use them.

1. Do a search on the project, Cmd-Shift-F
2. Search on something fun, like do a search on a keyword or a status
3. Click the magnifying glass to the left of the search term again. Scroll all the way to the bottom and select Save Search as Collection.

Now, that search is going to be in the Collection part of the binder. It’s also going to be dynamic. So for example, if you have a keyword for a character (or whatever) and you save a search as a collection, that collection will enable you to quickly pull up that list of documents.

Numbering problems

This is confusing, bear with me.

Let’s say you have a book that’s three acts and a hundred scenes in each act. You want each act to have a title page, and then each scene is its own deal.

Then let’s say you want number the scenes, like with a number at the top of each one. What’s going to happen is the title page is 1, and your first scene is numbered 2, and you probably want it to start at 1, right?

1. File > Compile
2. Select a Format in the left column (or create a new one).
3. In the right column, set all of the scrivs to a section type. For this example, I’m using Chapter Heading and Scene, plus Front Matter for stuff that’s not part of the book itself.
4. Click Assign Section Layouts. Select Scene.
5. (Tip: if you do this 19 times in a row because you keep changing this, it will always open at the first section type. You’re inevitably not editing the first section type. You open it, you’re in the first type, and it doesn’t look right, and you’re sure this stupid program burned you again. It’s because you’re in the wrong section type. Always click the right one first. This is annoying that it doesn’t persist your selection, but here we are.)
6. Pick a layout for the Scene. Hover over it and click the pencil in the upper right to edit it. Then click Edit Layout.
7. If you’re using a number and a title, click Title Options and in Title Prefix, put <$n:scene>. Don’t put <$n> or it will increment when the title pages are incremented.
8. If you want only a number, don’t do that. Go to Prefix, and in the Section prefix, put <$n:scene> and center it or whatever you need to do.

Start numbering at 0

We get it, you studied computer science.

Use a placeholder <$n-1> instead of <$n>. Or <$n:scene-1>. Internally the counter is still 1, 2, 3 etc. But when you display it, you are subtracting one so it’s 0, 1, 2, etc. (It doesn’t actually modify the value of the counter. It just displays it one lower.)

Yes, Scrivener doesn’t call them variables. They’re called placeholders. If you’re searching their manual, it’s called a placeholder, not a variable. I’ll use the words placeholder and variable once again so this actually shows up in search, like it doesn’t in their manual. Placeholder=variable.

How many comments are in my document?

grep -r "Comment ID" my-book-file.scriv/Files/Data | wc -l

Let me know if any of these are helpful or blatantly wrong. Like I said, I don’t always know what I’m doing, but I’m sure I’ll need to know the same exact thing later.

I went to show someone my web site yesterday, and the SSL certificate expired a month ago. (And every modern web broswer freaks out about that, and prints warnings and blocks everything and acts like I’m scraping credit cars and stealing identities, even though there’s nothing here that could do anything involving any PII whatsoever.) That shows how on top of things I have been here. I haven’t even thought about the blog in months. I mean, it’s mid-March and I don’t even think it’s 2026 yet. I’ve completely lost the thread on time. Anyway.

First big news is that we adopted two cats last month: Diego and Zuzu. They are brother and sister, from the same litter. But Diego is like twice as big. He’s all muscle, incredibly strong and fast, constantly moving. Zuzu is tiny, all fluff, and absolutely beautiful. Diego was pretty outgoing from the start, and has bonded more to Sarah, sleeping on the bed every night and following her around. Zuzu has been extremely skittish, hiding in the closet and always running away, but she’s slowly made progress. Diego is very protective of her, and they play well together, despite the size difference. It’s been great to have companions again, even if they’re tearing the house apart at 2am every night.

I have to admit there is a slight bittersweet feeling if comparing them to Squeak and Loca. They were both very cuddly, especially in their old age. And Loca was my soul cat, and would spend all day and night with me. I can’t even pick up Zuzu right now, and Diego is not a cuddler. Maybe that will change as they get older, but thinking about the years with Loca and the reality that she’s gone is still painful.

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Speaking of pain, I had to renew that SSL certificate, and a two-second job turned into like five hours of hurt. There’s this big schism between bncert and certbot and I think I started with bncert last year, then tried to get certbot going, and it completely screwed my site. Lots of panic, tons of floundering, and I could not get it to work. I eventually got the HTTPS stuff going and the permalinks were screwed up. Any configuration of the .htaccess made it worse. I don’t know what I did, but I eventually beat it enough to get it back to operational. But I will forget all of this, and in six months when the cert expires and the auto-renew script fails, I will screw it up again. (Note to self if you find this in August: don’t start chasing certbot; you used bncert.)

Anyway, if you find broken anything here, let me know.

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Nothing else. Giant release at work, which I won’t talk about here, but that was 100% of my bandwidth for a while. Trip booked for first week and a half of April, but I still need to flesh out what I’m doing. It’s not to any current war zone, but who knows how much that will change in the next month.

I’m currently heads down with Atmospheres 2. Every month since like a year ago, I said I would wrap it up in a month. I think I’m close to that, or at least I want to get a feature-complete draft by the time I leave on April 2. It’s getting there, but it’s over 500 pages now, so it’s a slow process. I think I started this book in 2014, so I really need to end it. Also, I have published 19 books, and I don’t want the 20th to be some dumb compilation zine thing, so I really need to keep on this until it’s done.

Nothing else. Everything else. I’ll try to remember I have a blog before the summer is over or whatever.

For my birthday this year, Sarah and I headed down to Mexico. This was a bit of an unusual vacation that didn’t really feel like a vacation, but in the opposite of the usual “we went to somewhere because we had to, and now need a week of vacation.” It was also noticeably different than my usual solo trips to oddball places that are more of an experience than actual rest.

So the deal: we flew in to Cancun, but actually stayed at a medical wellness spa about ten miles north, at Costa Mujeres. Flight in was delayed by three hours due to a broken plane, but it was a straight shot from SFO, maybe five hours. Got there and had a driver waiting, so we didn’t have to run the gauntlet of transportation people on the way out. We got loaded into an SUV and drove through Cancun at night, looking at the surrounding stuff on 307, but going straight to the facility.

I think the first question I kept getting was if I was worried about immigration or about the general safety, which is a bit silly. Immigration in and out was absolutely minimal. Coming back to the US, I’m pre-vetted with Global Entry and don’t even talk to a person. The immigration into Mexico was only a “how many days/where are you staying” and a stamp in the passport. As far as safety, we stayed at the facility the entire time, and it was roughly five times safer than an upscale Disney vacation. We were talking about this and I was trying to think of the most unsafe place I’ve ever been, and it would definitely be the United States. I mean, I caught RSV in Dubai, and I went to a statistically unsafe beach in Iceland because of the cold and brutal sneaker waves. But every time I’ve ever felt imminent danger, it’s been in the US. Anyway, Mexico was entirely safe.

The resort was insanely beautiful. It was a single curved row of suites, made to look like a strand of DNA from the top. Every unit had a view of the water and a private balcony, and the door opened up to a long balcony walkway that looked out over a mangrove forest. They built the place maybe two years ago, and it all looked ultra-modern and high-tech. There were infinity pools and fountains facing the water, with a white sand beach below. The entire facility was impeccable. Our room was giant, a suite with a living area, a balcony, and a bathroom roughly as big as our living room back home. It was all truly five-star.

On the first day, we started the program. We weren’t on a particular plan, but they offer different plans like for weight loss, smoking cessation, women’s health, longevity, performance training, and so on. I began with a battery of tests and evaluations, scans and measurements and blood draws, meetings with doctors, a dentist, various specialists, and a nutritionist. I got set up with a specific nutritional plan for the trip, and met with a coordinator to register for the various activities and treatments I wanted for the week. Everything’s done in an app, which keeps your schedule, shows activities available, and keeps your test results and meal menus for the week.

So there’s one dining facility you go to three times a day, and your meal times are scheduled. It’s a pretty swanky restaurant, with inside and outside seating. The food was all insanely good. I wasn’t programmed in for weight loss or for sugar detox, and was given extra protein for each meal, usually either additional tofu or tempeh, or sometimes a protein shake. The food was vaguely a Mediterranean diet, with no red meat or chicken, occasional fish, and mostly vegetable protein, but not strictly vegetarian or vegan. Portions were controlled, but no more so than any fancy restaurant that isn’t shoveling out buffet food. Everything looked and tasted incredible, and the staff were also great to work with at each meal. (Also, not on the menu, but Sarah somehow bribed someone in the kitchen, and on the night of my birthday, I got a slice of flourless chocolate cake. I don’t know if it was my general sugar depravation or not, but it was insanely good. Definitely not nutritionist-approved.)

I won’t get too into the medical stuff in a public post, but I did some physiotherapy and osteopathy on my back, and worked with a trainer to stretch more. There was a world-class gym on the top floor, and I went there every day. The bottom floor had a hydrotherapy circuit, which was fun: a walk-through pool of freezing cold water, then a Jacuzzi of boiling hot water. The main pool was warm, and had these water jet things that ranged from a pleasing massage to enough pressure to remove paint from a car. We also took a healthy cooking class, where we learned how to make various vegetable protein snacks and foods.

It’s hard to write much more about the week because it wasn’t about what did happen, but what didn’t happen. It was probably the lowest amount of stress I’ve had in my life since I was a teenager. There was no itinerary of museums and shops and landmarks I had to see. I didn’t do the usual ritual of filling dead space in the day by shoveling calories into my head. The TV never got turned on. I didn’t think of work at all. I just walked, exercised, ate long meals and talked with Sarah, and did nothing. It was incredible.

Another odd thing was that there weren’t many people there, and you seldom saw anyone. I think they scheduled meals in such a way that there were never crowds, and there were maybe a dozen or a dozen and a half guests there at any time. The people I saw - this was a real White Lotus situation, absurdly beautiful women and rich guys who if you asked them what they do, they would scoff and say, “Well, a little investing, and I’m on a few boards” and it turns out they’re like the COO of GE Healthcare or something. No kids, either. Overall, it was an extremely quiet situation, and everyone treated everyone else like how you act as a New Yorker when you run into someone famous. The brief head nod, ignore them otherwise.

Unfortunately, it all ended on Saturday. I had one more treatment that morning, and we had breakfast and lunch, then we said our goodbyes, paid up the tab, and a driver brought us back to the airport. It was an abrupt culture shock, as the Cancun airport is always cramped and crowded. I immediately fell off the wagon and got a Coke Zero. Flight back was pretty uneventful. I had Global Entry and got back in the country without even talking to anyone.

I immediately was back into the fray with work and house stuff. (We got the place painted while we were gone, and had to move everything back into place, which took a few days.) I am still trying to figure out exactly how this could work, how I could capture a few practices from the trip and make the other 51 weeks of the year match the pattern a bit more. Looking at my numbers, and my sleep and HRV were way better there. I didn’t gain or lose weight on the trip, but there was some non-tangible improvement in my general digestive health. Not looking for answers here, and I know some of them. It’s just a matter of building routines to support things better.

Anyway. Good stuff. I’d love to go back, or do a similar thing in another country. Maybe in the fall. First, I think there will be another dumb trip in late spring. I’ll start thinking about that in a month or two.

I am fifty-five today.

I feel a strong need to write something here to keep up with tradition, but I’m actually writing this weeks before my actual birthday, because my time management is so horrible, I will otherwise forget to do this and suddenly remember in mid-July. Also, I’ll be in Mexico on the actual day of my birthday, so I should figure this post out now.

55 is the 11th number in the Fibonacci sequence. The previous number was 34, and the year 2005 seems like three lifetimes ago. The next one is 89 and I honestly don’t expect to make it that far. 89 is also the year I graduated high school, so if there’s some miracle in stem cell therapy that keeps me going, expect an oddly nostalgic post 34 years from now.

55 is a nice round number that’s probably the end of middle age and the beginning of the senior years, which really doesn’t sound or feel right. I think about this far too much, the need to divide my life into three clean acts, and that act 3 is probably starting now, if it hasn’t already. I’ve read too many self-help books about midlife crisis and finding your purpose at the end of your life, and the only consensus that I’ve found is “do what makes you happy” or some similar advice I can’t entirely follow.

The IRS has something called the Rule of 55, which I’m now eligible for, I guess. After you turn 55, you can withdraw from the 401K at your current employer without penalty if you leave your job. I don’t plan on retiring this year, but it’s nice to know I won’t take a 10% hit immediately if I had to use this money to survive. The “when do I retire?” question seems to come up more now, and this nice round number presses the issue a bit more. Other magic numbers on the calendar include 59 1/2 (when I can withdraw from any retirement account without penalty), 62 (Social Security early retirement age), and 65 (Medicare eligibility.) I fully expect both Social Security and Medicare to be gone in the next three years, so remove those from the equation. (Actually, I expect it to be fully functional for everyone born before January 20, 1971, and that’s when the retirement age will be changed to 90 or something.)

55 is into this weird bubble with regard to health and death. When I was 34 or whatever and a classmate died, it was either a rare cancer or a spectacular car crash. I think after your young and stupid years are over, you enter a few decades where you’re probably not going to suddenly die, provided you wore a seat belt and didn’t sniff any questionable white powders. Now I’m firmly in the era of people just dying. I wouldn’t say “old age” but now people my age die, and there’s a lot less “too soon” about it.

So lots of famous people lived to the ripe old age of 55 and then didn’t. And some of them aren’t health things: Will Rogers had a plane crash at 55; Kate Spade killed herself at 55. So did Del Shannon. Johnny Ramone had cancer; so did Robert Urich. Woody Guthrie had Huntington’s. Paul Lynde had a heart attack. I think if I was in college and you asked me about Friedrich Nietzsche’s death, my answer would be, “Yeah, he was old.” Well, now I’m the same age as him.

Writing this entry 20 days after writing my end-of-year summary always sort of sabotages things here. I just about all of the quantifiable things of the last year: how much I wrote, walked, published, ate, flew, whatever. I guess I’m supposed to write about what I feel here, in some philosophical sense? All I feel is that I should keep writing. And I am.

My house is currently all half-dismantled because we’re getting it painted next week (or this week, I guess), and all of my paper journals are buried behind six metric tons of books in crates right now, which is great because I won’t go back and read what I wrote on my birthday 22 years ago or whatever (and also have a severe dust mite reaction that will require an Epi-Pen and a Benadryl sandwich). I have many birthday entries here, and I just started reading them, but I need to stop and actually write. So I’ll stop here and do that.

In the mad flurry of book release stuff and end-of-year stuff, I forgot to write down anything about the trip to the Midwest last month, so I’ll jot down a few things in case I need to remember it ten years from now.

• Total trip was a Saturday to Sunday thing, eight nights. But I took a side trip, drove to Indiana on the morning of the 24th and back the night of the 26th.
• There was a lot of stress about getting out of Oakland because it was zero visibility and flights were starting to get delayed or cancelled. We left a half-hour late, but made it up in the air. Had a very brief layover in Denver, then headed out to MKE. The flight felt insanely quick, with two segments that were just over 90 minutes each, and zero hassles on both.
• Hertz is officially on the no list forever. We landed at like 7:00 and when I went to the Hertz counter to get my car, it had closed completely at 5:00, with a phone number that said, “Sorry, closed.” Not sure why they didn’t tell me that when I rented the car. The rental thing said “your name will be on the board and you can take your car and leave.” It wasn’t. We hurried over to National and got set up there. After 20 minutes in the Hertz AI madness phone tree, I talked to a person who was going to charge me $300 for the privilege of not getting a car.
• We stayed at a Marriott Residence Inn in Wauwatosa. It’s in some weird “research park” thing built on top of a former sanitarium or something, and it’s a super-modern road with roundabouts and a bunch of empty buildings. The room was identical to the one I had in El Segundo in 2021. I think it’s the same as what I had in Denver and in Chicago in 2022. That’s always a weird experience.
• It was like 20 degrees the whole time I was there. No real snow. Insanely high winds, like Iceland-rip-your-car-door-off winds. Losing half my body fat made this rough. But the hotel had an incredible warmth to it, which always felt nice.
• There were three days of family stuff with Sarah’s family, but the out-of-town contingent wasn’t there yet, so this was mostly quiet time with her mom or dad. We went to a mall, which was busy, like almost mid-00s busy. I expected it to be quiet, given the economy. Went to Boswell Books, which was pretty packed. Always good to see people buying analog.
• I don’t know why, but any time I stay at a Marriott, anywhere in the world, any time I go to the gym, there’s an older Asian woman on the elliptical for like four hours straight. It doesn’t matter if I’m in Schaumburg or Helsinki or Nuremberg or Orlando. I think they fly them in. It’s almost refreshing in a weird way.
• The drive to South Bend was pretty uneventful, and much faster than I remember. I feel like when me and Ray drove to the Milwaukee Metalfest in 1993, it took like six or seven hours, and this was maybe three hours plus an hour of time shift.
• I stayed at this weird Hilton vacation property that’s off Main Street in Mishawaka, by the UP mall. I think it was built in 1995 and not touched since. It has all of this college football stuff in it and probably makes all of its money on home games. I told my sister it looked like a Notre Dame themed funeral home. She told her friend who works for Hilton and he thought it was hilarious.
• I didn’t pay for the hotel (thanks, Amex) and I’m glad, because it had a million little annoyances: a kitchenette that was a dorm fridge and microwave and nothing more; bad plumbing; lots of noise from the pool below; a completely unusable exercise room containing I think the Sears treadmill my mom threw out in 1997. Good location, except there’s a real Hilton just north of it, and that’s confusing when you give someone directions.
• I went to University Park mall on Christmas Eve. I managed to lose my Pocket 3 camera, which sort of soured the whole trip for me.
• Went to my sister’s twice, had Christmas there. Saw my dad for brunch the next day, then headed out.
• The trip was very odd, because I did not feel like I was in Indiana, at all. Part of this was the short amount of time I had, and I didn’t get to wander. Part of it is things have changed so much. I remember walking the mall (and recording it on video, which of course I lost) and wondering what was still there from when I used to frequent the place in the late 80s/early 90s, and the answer is absolutely nothing. I guess JC Penney still remains, but there’s been 100% turnover, plus a giant food court that’s alien to me, new carpet, new skylights, new parking lot layout, and now the Sears is dead. Most of my time in Indiana was like this, which astounds me, considering how slow-moving things are there, and I used to come back and places would have the same exact signage from when I was a kid in like 1975.
• I think a big part of this is I’ve turned a corner on the Nostalgia Problem. Looking at old journals, I used to ruminate way too much on things like Bloomington or the one weird year I spent working at IUSB or my old haunt, the Concord Mall. Now I don’t care. I don’t think about it. That strong sentimentality is gone. I have a few theories on this, and maybe I worry about it slightly, but I’m glad I have reached this point.
• Quick trip back to Milwaukee. All I will say about the trip around Chicago: you should not be able to legally call something an express lane if the speed limit is 55.
• Because I missed the 24th/25th festivities, I arrived in MKE just in time for the post-holiday wind-down, and basically had a day in which to pack and jettison trash and get ready for the flight home.
• There was something almost Scandinavian about the street at that Discovery Ignition whatever park in Wauwatosa. It reminded me of the layout in Iceland or Oslo or something. Maybe it was an odd sense memory of the temperature and wind outside, but I liked it.
• Also, there is a county park across the way that’s nothing but some slight hills covered in golden grass that’s waiting for the spring showers. I had this ASA drone test book with a picture of someone flying a sUAS standing on a hill like this, and it made me wish I had brought a drone with me, although the winds would have made it tough, plus standing outside in 20 degree weather for an hour or two isn’t ideal. I spent the first half of the trip thinking I should drive to Costco and buy a cheap Potensic Atom 2 to take a few flights there. Then I lost that stupid camera and was out $500 and realized this was a dumb idea.
• Trip back was pretty stress-free. But it’s sad to come home and not have anyone waiting for you. I really miss returning to the cats after having been gone and having both of them be total velcro for a few days.

Overall, it was a pretty quick and uneventful trip, but I’ll take it. I was happy to see everyone and we had some quality time in there, but it was almost strange how it went down. And miracle of miracles: I came back with no flu, no Covid, not even a cold. That’s a good start to 2026.