I’ve been working pretty hard on a few projects as of late, and that generally results in my taking mini-breaks by wandering around my room and tidying things up. It’s started to seem pretty ridiculous to me that I have so many papers. When writing, it’s just easier to brainstorm and work out outlines with a notepad and a piece of paper. It might not be as fast and the result is quite a bit harder to read, but it’s just easier for some reason.

By the way, I meant to mention this in my last post, but I suppose it’s easier to find by itself.

Celtx’s auto-complete (character’s names and locations) is a real pain. Sometimes I’m ahead of Celtx, sometimes it’s ahead of me, so sometimes I need one return, sometime I need two–one for auto-complete (to accept the name you’ve already finished typing) and another to start a new line. Celtx doesn’t have an option to turn that off yet, but I discovered that keeping the cursor in front of a symbol or punctuation mark completely confounds auto-complete, and keeps it from suggesting anything, letting you consistently get to the next line with only one press of ‘enter’.

To clarify, write a question mark, hit the left arrow key once so the cursor is behind it, and then for the bulk of your writing you “push” the question mark in front of your text. The only problems so far are with parenthesis (this method messes with the cool way parenthesis wrap around what you type), and scene headings (hitting ‘enter’ on a blank line makes that line a scene heading, but with a symbol already in that line, Celtx just adds another blank line). Complications included I still think it’s easier than battling with auto-complete every time I have a character speak.

Hope it’s helpful,

Lark

Yes, I’m still on version 0.9.9.6 of Celtx, even though they’re all the way to 2.0.1 now. My reasons? After the fold.