So I figured out how to do custom scene separators in Scrivener. Actually, I figured out more than that. As of the more recent Mac OS the 32-bit kindlegen no longer works right from within Scrivener. Amplezonk is pushing their new .mobi formatter, the Kindle Create system, and last I heard only have links to the 32-bit -- but they are also offering Kindle Previewer 3. Which, surprise surprise, contains kindlegen 64-bit inside. Because after all you can modify texts slightly from within Previewer, so of course they just stuck a copy of their own editor in the resources and leveraged that.
If you control-click to look through "Package Contents" on the ap, you'll find the executable. Make a copy somewhere useful (like the Applications folder) and point Scrivener to it, and you can output a Kindle reader-compatible eBook straight from Scrivener.
As part of this process I ended up changing the way I organize again. Although you can easily uncheck or otherwise identify work files within the "Manuscript" folder as non-compiling, it is slightly smoother and cleaner just to keep all that stuff outside. Since the nature of a text file (and even if it is a "folder," as in has text files in hierarchy under it) is unrelated to the format and contents, it is easy enough to write in scenes and later collect or promote to chapters et al.
Inline graphics are easy. The thing about Scrivener is you can automate all the centering, spacing, enumeration, and etc. of titles. Generate a TOC on the fly as well. Which is great for eBooks because just putting "Chapter One" in a bigger font would mean sometimes it would wrap funny on the end-user's machine. Doing it in code means it scales properly with viewer size and font size.
It will of course pop the standard "#" or the also-common "* * *" between scenes automatically as well. Or you can point to an image stored in the Scrivener project, in typical markup: ($img:owls.png;h=50). Seanan McGuire is one of the writers I've seen doing that recently.
So...printed out a photograph of an Owl of Athena discovered during the Parthenon restoration (I bought a ceramic copy of that one while I was at the museum, too). Taped that on to the light-box I got a long time ago for just such things. After finally finding a brush pen that wasn't all dried out, mocked up a black-and-white treatment. Edited in GIMP, added an alpha channel and exported as a transparent PNG (so it will work with off-white paper).
And why? Well, the new outline is starting to take shape. But one of the things I'm trying to solve is how it reads; how it flows, how much time is spend between things and during things, how much it seems to jump around, etc. For that it would be cool to be able to see the text in something resembling the final format.
This isn't just for ease of viewing. I actually pad scenes or added lead-in material to compensate for what I was feel are problems in chunk size and transition. So this is going to help me know what actually has to be in the text.
And at the moment the cuts and changes are fairly small. The changes really start to hit at a place I was unsurprised to have them hit; at the point where the real adventure starts. Most of what I'm doing is punching up certain characters, giving them more visibility and a more specific role, and most of that is going forward.
Except as a result of these notes I really, really want one more Germany scene now; some excuse to scale the walls of a castle in the process of doing something heroic. Saving a kitten, I don't know.
But back to writing. As nice as it was to spend an evening learning about how to set up chapters and scenes in Scrivener, and some of the more advanced export/compile settings, and of course do a little graphic arts, it is way too early to play with my probably-a-bad-idea cover.
(Greek pot on one of those dramatic gradient-and-fog backgrounds. Photo-real black-figure ware, but created in 3d with the figures in modern dress).
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A slight edit: although it is possible to use a transparent image in Blogger (it requires replacing some of the stock CSS) it is not currently supported on Kindle. After struggling with it for a bit I went through my Kindle library, turned on the sepia page color option, and opened every book I owned that had extra graphics for chapter titles and similar. Not a single one passed the white square test.
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