The folks who do that class have a great catalogue of stuff-- money is really the only thing keeping me from enrolling in more.  Definitely worth a look... the CORE classes though, while they're great I think they're becoming more public tools on the BlackList Forum so you may want to wait before paying money on those.

And I guess those questions depend on who your audience is. Kids, teens, families, women, men, couples, etc.

So after years of getting pestered, I finally took the plunge and downloaded Scrivener (well, I didn't take the "pay plunge" yet, I still ahve the rest of the month to "try it out" but I guarantee I'll be paying).  I was really hesitant about it because it seemed like, well, ONE: each project would take up a lot of space, especially with all the reference I use, so I'm trying to cut back on that, and TWO: It seemed like it would make it really easy to skip steps.  The way my workflow is designed now, I need to have complete a step before I can start another, I need confidence and actual material.  The way Scrivener works, where you have everything at your fingertips, seems like it would be really easy to work out of order and screw the whole thing up.  So what I'm actually using it for isn't so much writing as it is long-term storage of miscellaneous ideas.  Stuff that's waiting for a story and characters to be attached to.

It'll be really interesting to see how the program effects my workflow.  I'm pretty well organized, but I'm also a lateral thinker so I like to have everything separate.  It's not so bad now after one day but I can see these things becoming really convoluted really quickly.

I feel like I'm putting together a miniature Wikipedia like thing for my big ideas... or rather, the nebulous things that might become ideas.  And the documents actually remind me of the first web pages I made, which I like (I was so god-d*mn prolific back in those days, so I feel like I'm getting some of that energy).

The funny thing is that I feel like I can't imagine seriously writing with this thing, just seriously organizing (it's actually quite calming).  It's a repository for stray ideas, things I can't figure out, waiting for the day when I might be able to.  And I'm very diligent about organizing as I go: folders with subfolders with subfolders, all properly labeled.  Just having a place to put a stray idea about something bigger and then to forget about it knowing it's in the right place... it's a bit of a relief.

Plus, my stuff is segregating by format (pictures, movies, text files, final draft files) and categorized by where they came from.  Now if I have an idea, I can put the visuals into the text file right in there.

Here's something I just threw in:



The actual picture I filed with the other pictures in its' set, in an appropriate subfolder in the proper subfolder on the external drive.  But now I pout a copy of it in Scrivener with a quick note (I'll add others later), filed it as an interesting location.  Then I can figure out what it is, what the characters could do there, etc.  The old way would have just been a JPG file with a whole bunch of others in folders, but I'd either open one at a time or roll through them all.  Just doing this gives me so much more context.

What I love about this is the next time I stumble upon something like this, I can slip it right in there instead of having to go back and hunt for it, and I can remind myself exactly what I was thinking.  File and forget.

I actually need to go back in there and divide my scene ideas into "Work, Play, and Fling" folders (thinking Nip/Tuck structure!) to make it easier for me later on to construct episode plots.