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.

I’m happy to announce that my new book Statue of Limitations is out now!

TL;DR:

• Kindle
• Print
• It’s 978-1-942086-23-9 if you want to order it from anywhere that does Ingram

This book is a collection of 30 stories, flash fiction, and other fragments and zine articles and stuff. It’s similar in theme to my 2019 book Ranch: The Musical, and a bit more lightweight than last year’s Decision Paralysis. I’m happy I was able to get this one in right under the wire in the last few hours of 2025, so I can clear the deck and start working on something new.

I spent most of 2025 trying to land a sequel to Atmospheres and got pretty close, but life sort of fell apart for a minute back in September, and I probably lost a good month there. I can’t remember when I wrote down this title, but I started throwing various zine articles that were never published, dream journals, listicles, and parts of stories into a draft towards the end of October, with a goal of getting a 20,000-word quickie done in 2025.

This is the third time I’ve done this, and it’s sort of akin to the Agile development process. Ship early, ship often; I do these much more lightweight books that are cheap and can be written fast, read fast, published fast. I hate to use the term “punk rock” to describe anything, but the idea here is that instead of spending years chipping away at an 800-page tome that eventually nobody will read, I’d rather push out these quick DIY dispatches and keep the river flowing. Maybe they aren’t perfect; maybe they’re filled with typos or dead ends. But the goal is to keep them going and constantly improve, get the next one slightly better than the last.

On October 19 (my anniversary), I had a new project with 14 documents, 11,000 words and a potential title but no story for it. I think by Thanksgiving, I’d broken 25,000 words, and it got up to 30K shortly after that. The word count is deceptive, because maximalist writers like David Foster Wallace will have sentences that long, but this writing is so dense and concentrated, a 500-word story can have a ton of work in it.

I took two weeks off in December, and hoped I could catch up a bit. November was rough because of the death of Loca, but I kept at it, chipping away. My hope dwindled on getting it done by the 31st, but I trudged on, thinking at least I could wrap it up by the end of January. I got almost no work done on the trip to Wisconsin and Indiana, and when I got back, I opened the manuscript and just stared at it, thinking it would take me a week or two to get moving from a dead stop.

I don’t know what happened, but I woke up at five in the morning on the 31st and thought, “I have to finish this today.” I spent the next twelve hours at full combat speed, rushing through each piece, writing what needed to be finished, junking a couple of stories and rounding as many corners as possible. I had to do the Kindle layout, which required a Scrivener upgrade that I thought for sure was going to doom me. I decided to defer the print version and my usual “long last look” pass just to get the Kindle draft out, knowing I could do another editing pass and get the wraparound cover and print layout done on the first. At 0500 I didn’t even have the titular story started. By dinner time, the book was submitted.

Another quick announcement I’ll get into later: this is the first book on a new imprint called Rumored Books. I’ll use it going forward for my stuff. I don’t know what else I will do with it or how I’ll market it. You’re looking at the URL for it (rumored.com) although I’ve got rumoredbooks.com registered and it’s pointed here for now. Maybe I will spin up a fancy site nobody will read for the imprint. Maybe it will become a different blog. Maybe I will publish other stuff. More on this later I guess.

What I do know is I have to keep going. This is my 19th book, and I have at least two dozen ideas, half-done manuscripts, and other things up on blocks right now, so I have to keep the river flowing. Stay tuned.

Been a while. Various things have been up, and I’ve completely lost the thread here. I always feel a need to get back to the blog and start posting regularly, but getting the first post down after a month or so sets the tone, and I have no idea what the tone is, so here goes.

First major thing was that my cat Squeak died. We got both of the cats 18 years ago in Denver, and she was maybe six months old then. So she had a good run, and she’s had various medical stuff for a while. She kept going a lot longer than expected, but the last year or so has been rough. It was still an incredibly hard decision to let her go, and a month and a half later, I’m still upset about it. This was compounded by the fact that I spent most of that 18 years working from home, and a heavy part of my routine was seeing what was up with her during the day. I was going to write more about this, but I can’t. Extremely grateful for Humane Colorado for the start of her journey and Lap of Love for the end.

Second… I guess writing got away from me for a bit. My next book is possibly too political, and I now have many fears about publishing this in the current climate. Aside from all my other fears about writing and publishing, I also don’t want to suddenly not be able to get back in the country on my next time I go on vacation.  So I lost maybe a month there before I was able to get back to it.

There are a lot of various concerns about persona and the type of writing I will do in the future. I think I waver between wanting to do something “serious” or complex, like some David Foster Wallace magnum opus. Or I want to do basically a performance art piece of wild and crazy absurdism. And I think whichever one I do, I have to sort of “become” that person to the public. I think of how I was always posting over-the-top memes and crazy stuff ten years ago, and how that dovetailed with my writing at the time. I ran into a wall with that whole thing, and I don’t know what the answer is here. (And I’m not looking for one.) This is probably the subject of another essay. Regardless, I’m writing, and that’s all I really care about.

Third (why am I still counting) - I have been busy trying to get my remote pilot license, the FAA Part 107. I’ve been hemming and hawing about taking this test pretty much since I started flying drones in 2021, and I’ve bought numerous books and video courses and flash cards and whatever else, but never got it together to take the test. Finally, I said screw it, went to the FAA, and registered for an exam last Friday. After a week or so of cramming, I realized there’s no way I would be ready, so I pushed it out two weeks. I’m still working through a course, flipping through flash cards, and trying to remember when you use CTAF versus UNICOM at a towered airport after hours to self-announce traffic advisories. (And that whole thing is stupid, because I have to know all of this stuff for the 107, and then the very last rule is, “sUAS PICs cannot communicate on CTAF.”

Aside from writing and studying, I’ve been wasting a lot of time building book nooks. A book nook is a sort of diorama about the size of an unabridged dictionary with a glass front and a very detailed scene inside. I have built four of them now, and the one that got me hooked was the Kowloon Walled City 2049 kit. Of course I feel a need to customize these things and have fallen down this rabbit hole of paints and plastics and accessories and lights and scratch-building new details. All of this is questionable because the one thing I don’t have is shelf space. But it’s been a fun distraction.

Work is work. Had a brief staycation because I canceled a trip due to all the Squeak stuff. My only other travel plans in 2025 are Christmas and the Midwest, although I’m thinking about another crazy trip for my birthday. More on that when I figure it out.

I took a quick trip to Cleveland this weekend, to see a few old friends and headline a book reading. The trip was over before it started, it felt like. Anyway, let me rush through the usual summary.

Reason one for the visit was that my company gives us Juneteenth off, which was a Thursday. So I added the 20th and made it a nice four-day weekend. I feel some need to take more short trips like this between my longer journeys, so this looked like a good spot to do it.

The big reason for the trip was John Sheppard moved to Ohio recently, and just bought a house and got settled in near where he spent his childhood. I haven’t seen him since he retired, and wanted to check out his new place. The other big reason was that I haven’t seen Michael Stutz in a long time, and I wanted to see his record store and his house. Also, I twisted his arm a bit and the three of us set up a book reading at the store.

The trip out was easy enough. I booked a direct flight from SFO to CLE, and left at 9 in the morning. It was a bit clogged getting to the airport at rush hour, and I had to jump over to terminal 2 to get through security fast, then jog back to terminal 3. Not a major problem, though. It was about four and a half hours in the air, which I mostly spent messing around on my laptop. It was raining and thundering heavily in Cleveland all day, and while en route, there was argument over if we’d be coming in early or late, but we landed a bit early. John picked me up and we headed over to his place.

I haven’t spent time in Ohio probably since 1999. I stayed in Berea a few days on my moving trip east from Seattle to New York, at Michael’s old place. Also had a funeral later that same year in Cincinnati, and maybe an airport layover here or there. But I’ve met a lot of people in Ohio online since then. I didn’t really have a strong feel for what it would be like, especially because Ohio has become a bit of a punchline in recent years, but has also been going through a lot of upheaval. I wanted some face time with a few people, but I also just wanted to see what things were like these days.

Me and John stopped at his place to drop off luggage, and he’s got a nice setup, a 3br/1ba on a quiet cul-de-sac, basement, yard, detached garage in the back. He just moved in, so the furniture is minimal and he’s just started settling into the place. It’s got a big upstairs with a low ceiling that’s completely empty, but will make an excellent writing cave in the future. He set me up in the Ohio Room, this monument to Ohio sports teams that’s borderline disturbing and hilarious, with a neon OHIO sign on the wall, bright red Ohio State bedding, and hanging flags for the Tribe, the Browns, and the Cavs.

We headed out to Angelo’s in Lakewood to split a pizza, then drove out to Edgewater Park to see the lake and take the requisite picture in front of the big Cleveland sign. Also stopped at a giant grocery to get some supplies, and wandered around a bit before heading back to the house for a few hours of talk that evening.

Friday morning, we got up and running, then headed over to see Bailey and son over in Lakewood. It’s always interesting to meet up with someone who’s been a friend online for like a decade who I’ve never seen face-to-face. Social media’s created this odd parallel universe where you can talk to people every day but not really “know” them - or do you? Anyway, it was cool to chat for a few hours and see the neighborhood where she now lives, and the weather on Friday morning was not bad at all for hanging out outside.

For lunch, we headed over to Canary’s, which was a family restaurant. John was sure the place used to be a Pizza Hut way back when, stripped down to the studs and redone as a diner. It was the type of place with the paper mats advertising local businesses in Comic Sans, cleaning agencies and painting services and cash-for-gold shops. Lots of old folks in the booths, and we got giant menus with 167 items in them. I got pierogis, and when I asked if it came with a vegetable, the waitress said “it has onions on it.” Good food, but a bowl of cheese soup and a dozen cheese pierogis was a bit much. John got an open-faced meatloaf sandwich that looked absolutely crippling. It reminded me of the many places I’d either end up in after a church service as a kid or during a late night with two or three other juvenile delinquents.

We spent the afternoon driving between malls. I don’t give a shit about mall stuff anymore, but it seemed like we had to check out one or two while I was in Ohio. We first went to Great Northern, which looked large but beaten and half-empty. We then went to SouthPark Mall, which is much larger and seemed to have more higher-end stores open. Neither mall was particularly busy on a Friday afternoon. I didn’t pay much attention to the exact layout or details, because I had bigger things to worry about that night.

After chilling out for a bit at home, we headed over to The Current Year, Michael’s record store. It’s in the same building in Parma as Rudy’s, a Polish bakery. The store is a great little space that’s crammed with a large variety of heavily curated albums, from rare records to yacht rock to psychedelic to mood music. There are lots of books (including mine) and collectibles and rarities all over the place. It’s the kind of place that simultaneously makes me wish I collected vinyl and had a turntable, and made me glad I didn’t, because I’d spend way too much money there and quickly form A Bad Habit.

Anyway, it was great catching up with Michael and his wife Marie. He has a small room for readings or bands, and two other themed side rooms for different music collections, plus several warehouse rooms filled to the brim with music and movies and things to be sold. I got all the gear set up and we ate some good Lebanese food Marie ordered, then got ready to roll.

Oh, gear for this trip: the Canon R10 for stills, with a Sigma 18-50; the DJI Pocket 3 for video; two DJI Mic2 wireless mics; and those were fed to a Zoom H5. The store also had a PA system with mic, and both me and Michael were recording on phones.

We only had a couple people show for the reading, but that was expected. This was mostly about recording and hanging out. Michael opened and read some haiku, a bit from Circuits of the Wind, and some of a newer thing he’s working on about Treasure Island. John then read the first chapter from Small Town Punk. And then I read.

I don’t do readings. I don’t like public speaking, and I don’t exactly write the kind of zingers you can rattle off to an audience. The last time I read was in 2005, in Boston, and that was an event where I co-headlined and only read a single non-fiction story from my old book Dealer Wins.  So headlining an event was a bit much. I wasn’t sure what to read, and didn’t know what the audience would be like. I don’t know how I did, and of course feel like I didn’t do well at all. But I think I survived. I read a chapter from my next book, Atmospheres 2, and the last chapter of Decision Paralysis. I also did a story from Vol. 13, plus some short bits from Book of Dreams and Ranch: the Musical. I think my total was about 45 minutes, which is probably 35 minutes longer than my longest reading ever.

Anyway, we hung out a bit more and I signed stuff, then we went outside in the night. It was strange to feel the cool air and look up at the Rudy’s sign with RUMORED TO EXIST on it. There’s something about the midwestern night in the summer that’s an immediate time machine for me, and being out after the reading in the darkness reminded me of that.

Saturday: me and John went downtown, which was almost empty, and started at the Science Center. My main goal was to see the Apollo capsule they had there, which is the one from Skylab 3. We also hung out and took a guided tour of the Mather, a 600-some foot long century-old freighter. And we wandered around the area by the stadium and the Hard Rock. Later we went further downtown to see the Arcade, a totally empty and Shining-looking shopping center, and Tower City Center and Terminal Tower. We also poked in the library downtown.

I think my general feel for Cleveland was that it reminded me of Milwaukee with the Wisconsin removed, or maybe the suburbs of Chicago without the Chicago. I liked that, the way it had lots of varying food and good infrastructure, without a lot of traffic. There were the pockets of rust belt abandonment, but there were also some pretty well-restored areas downtown, and clean suburbs that seemed pretty walkable.

But… we picked a bad weekend for walking, because it was insanely hot out, maybe the mid-90s and humid as hell. We got home and I tried to take a quick 20-minute nap before dinner. The second I passed out, the power went, taking the AC with it. That rolling blackout/brownout thing kept going as more and more people put their air on high. I’ve been to some fairly hot countries in recent years, but the sweltering midwest summers are definitely a flashback for me, back to the days when you searched the subdivision for a buddy with a pool.

We went over to Michael and Marie’s place for dinner, and they grilled hamburgers on the patio as we talked forever. Michael gave us a full tour of the upstairs of the house, which is amazing. I can’t do justice to it with a full explanation, but this was a heavy early-60s vibe, a ranch belonging to a former NASA scientist, and it’s carefully laid out from stem to stern with a collection of furniture, appliances, and collectibles that perfectly encapsulate the space age.

After dinner, Michael was ready to give us the full tour of Sunken Studios, his basement lair which is a tribute to several Tiki bars and beaches from the past. This was absolutely mind-blowing. Michael and Marie have spent decades collecting things from Tiki bars, visiting them across the country, documenting and researching and planning, then spent the last dozen years meticulously recreating it underneath his house. I really can’t do justice for the thing Michael has created, but I felt like I’d been stuck in the center of his brain, completely entangled in this world of beaches and Polynesian memories and relics. Absolutely amazing.

Sunday was pretty sedate, and a travel day. Me and John wandered around a bit, and went to another family restaurant called Gene’s Place. It was in a strip mall, and after we headed to a boutique donut place called Peace, Love, and Little Donuts. John bought a dozen of the mini-donuts, and even though I can’t really do donuts anymore, I tried one and they were great.

Most of my luggage on the way out was books I left for Michael, so it was easy to pack up everything and head out. Trip back was a bit of a pain because of a bunch of dumb little things: someone taking up half my seat, charged twice for Wi-Fi that didn’t work, videos didn’t work in my seatback thing. Got back late and exhausted, and had to turn it around and get to work early Monday. But it was a good weekend, a good break, and I’ll have to get out there again soon. Not next, though. Big trip in August, and it’s definitely not Ohio. Stay tuned.