So. A few years ago, I bought a copy of Office '03. It had five uses. I used my last one on my last laptop.
Which died last April. Well, started dying, probably in March or so.
My laptop is my livelihood. I do everything on it: writing, publishing, budgeting, household accounting, planning, communicating with the kids' school, checking their grades...everything. I can't do that with a dead laptop. I mean, sure, I can use one of the desktops, but there are times I'm not physically capable of working at a desk, but the work goes on.
I ordered a new one from Amazon. And a thumb drive (well, pinky-fingernail drive--a 500 GB one the size of a dongle) to put all my files on. The drive arrived the last day of April, and I was able to copy everything onto it before the old laptop gave up its last gasp, and the new laptop came in on the first of May.
It had a year of Office 365. So, I pulled it up and started using it. Finished the final draft of Certified Public Assassin on it, and pulled the trigger on publishing...
...and something about the newest Word threw tantrums about working with older Word. To the point of breaking even LibreOffice. Oh, the electronic copy of Certified Public Assassin worked okay, but I could not get the print version to fly. No, Word insisted on fucking up with the margins. It did not matter what I did, I could not get the print version to work. And I hacked away at that, on and off, for six fucking months.
So, my Office subscription runs out at the end of next April. I could re-up for a hundred bucks a year...every year. I could.
But I don't wanna. It's a cheat. I don't replace a laptop every year. I don't pay for a new computer every year. Why should I have to rent my software every year?
I figured I'd have to switch over to LibreOffice at the end of the year, when my subscription ran out, when I bought the laptop.
And then...a miracle happened. I've made money, this year. Not a lot, but double what I did last year. And I'm producing again.
That changed the dynamics a bit. And changed my mental dialogue a lot. I mean, if I'm actually making money,* shouldn't I have tools to make money with?
Keep in mind, I'm categorically opposed to renting software. I talked it over with my other half, and when Black Friday deals hit, I purchased a new writing/formatting software: Atticus.
On a whim, I uploaded Certified Public Assassin, and put it through the formatting. And then, I uploaded the file to Amazon, and looked at the internals.
Lo and behold: the text stayed within the margins. Everything looked good. The cover took some extra work, but everything worked. Everything worked. I could publish a print version. Atticus fixed what rented Word broke. And Certified Public Assassin is now available in hardback!
So I can definitively state that it works as a formatting tool. It's worth the (one time) cost for that alone.
However, that's not all it does: it works quite well as writing software, and allows you to set writing goals, too. And uses reminders to keep you on task when you sit down to write. Something Word does not help with. It also keeps track of your word count by chapter as well as by book file. Yeah, it takes some getting used to, but it really is intuitive, and a good bit easier to use than Word. Your screen's less busy, less distracting, you're only looking at one chapter at a time; while yes, that means you have to dig into it to look at how your entire document is looking, you can get a page estimation by the trim size you want to use for the project you're working on. It shows you previews of your project by how it'll look in print, or in any of several e-book readers/reader software on a tablet.
I would say that this is probably one of my best investments into my career as a writer. I am honestly blown away by the sheer awesome. I mean, maybe there's better writers' software on iThing platforms, but this is, I think, perhaps hands down the best one out there for anything else.
I cannot recommend it highly enough.
*Double last year's income is a bit under half what I made in my first year teaching for MSSU. A hair under a semester's pre-tax income, in other words.
