Six Crucial Questions for Keith Blount of Scrivener

From the NaNo Blog.

Six Crucial Questions for Keith Blount of Scrivener:

Each year, we interrogate one or two NaNoWriMo corporate sponsors on the OLL blog. It’s our way of saying thanks for the vital funding that our sponsors contribute to NaNoWriMo and the Young Writers Program. Today, I asked the generous, mysterious Keith Blount of Scrivener some hard-hitting questions about halogen light bulbs, children as coders, and the pernicious rumor that his software contains a virtual homunculus who will write your novel for you if you awaken it properly.

(And yes, that’s Keith in the Obi-Wan bathrobe, above.)

So Scrivener’s parent company is called Literature & Latte—clearly a touching homage to Letters and Light. Do you prefer incandescent or compact fluorescent bulbs?
Well, as much as we do love Letters and Light, “Literature & Latte” was what I always intended to call my bookshop café—but unfortunately I was too lazy to run one, so I applied it to a software company instead. That theoretical café would almost certainly have been lit by energy-saving tornado bulbs with bayonet caps. Mind you, I also have as much of a soft spot for halogen spot light bulbs as the next man.

Literature & Latte’s About Us page reveals a somewhat shocking fact: Your coding, management, and marketing team consists entirely of children. How do you manage the quality-control issues that arise from having such young employees?
If we find a single bug, we call them wild things, then send them to bed early with no supper. (We’ve also told them that the term “bugs” is used because if they make any mistakes, bugs crawl out of the screen and into their ears and eyes.) That seems to do the trick, along with the fact that we have Matt Smith tied up in the L&L lock-up. The children know that he won’t be released to make another series of Doctor Who unless they get things right (the first time, thank you very much).

You describe Scrivener as an “unbloated” piece of writing software. What are some of the craziest feature requests you’ve received over the years?
The craziest ones are usually the ones that start, “I love your software but it would be great if…” and then proceed to describe turning it into a completely different application that tracks the amount of flour used in all the pancakes they’ve made over the years or something. We don’t get many like that, though - fortunately most of the suggestions and feedback we receive are really useful and not crazy at all. The phrase I have come to be most wary of in requests is: “I am sure you will make millions and lots of users will want to buy your software if…” This is usually followed by something particularly abstruse that only about four users in the world would ever use, all of them palaeontologists keeping detailed spreadsheets about philately.

Does the spell-check on Scrivener default to British English as part of your agenda to get Americans to use a “u” in the word favorite?
If only! We do get lots of Americans telling us we’ve spelled “licence” wrong on the website, though, and asking for a free licence in return for spotting the “typo”. (Webster has a lot to answer for, taking our crazy spellings with their Middle English legacies and turning them into something that actually makes sense.)

Is it true that the Windows version of Scrivener has a “Easter egg” hidden somewhere in the binder that will write your whole novel for you if you unlock it?
Who told you that? It’s supposed to be top-secret. Even if you find it, though, the catch is that it’s in Ukrainian and if you don’t hit “Compile” within a three second window, every third letter gets replaced with an asterisk. Also, it doesn’t write your novel, but the novel of the person who bought Scrivener before you. (This last part is a bug and we’ve cancelled Christmas until our child employees fix this, although at this rate we may have to take Arthur Darvill hostage too.)

On the Literature & Latte site, you admit that you still haven’t written “The Novel.” Is there anything we can do to help you get it done?
You’re already doing it! I finally sat down to do NaNoWriMo myself this month, after many years of either threatening or giving up part-way through. I haven’t exactly followed the rules properly as I have used the month to work on something I’d already sort-of started, but it’s been incredibly productive and, although “The Novel” certainly won’t be anywhere near finished in the next two weeks, throwing myself into it in the spirit of NaNo for the past two weeks has enabled me to see the way forward with it, get a good start and to see where it’s going. So thank you!

Thank you, Keith!