Writing Archives - Writeside.com

Ali Smith vs. the Authoritarians

A few notes on the Gliff series.

Ali Smith is a wonder. The Scottish writer (currently based in Cambridge, England) is one of the most prolific novelists working today, and she is almost certainly the most timely in terms of her political depictions. Her recent Seasonal Quartet of novels addressed the world’s growing political dysfunction in near real time. Now she’s given us the two-volume Gliff series (Gliff last year and, on May 19 in the U.S., its follow-up, Glyph). Since the novels are thematically related we’ll address them both in this review.

Let’s begin with the word “Gliff” itself—of Scottish origin, and most commonly defined as meaning a transient glance, especially of something that startles or frightens. The word is thematically apt, and it also fits with Smith’s playfulness as a writer: a mere glimpse of something fraught, followed by something more concrete with “Glyph,” a hieroglyphic character or symbol or a pictograph. The second word is the more concrete of the two, referencing something specific. Likewise with the two novels: Gliff describes a vague, near-term dystopia but Glyph references the ongoing, catastrophic genocide in Gaza.

Gliff cover. — Book cover: Penguin Random House.

Both books employ two children as protagonists, along with an important horse (hence the paired book jackets). The horse (named Gliff in the eponymous first novel) is used as a symbol of freedom and hope.

Briar (gender unspecified in the beginning of the novel but usually addressed as “Bri”) and their younger sister Rose are the children in the first book, which I find the slightly stronger of the two. Bri and Rose are left to fend for themselves in an unspecified location resembling Britain. Their mother is on an errand to help someone else, entrusting their care to her boyfriend Leif. The errand takes longer than expected, and Leif sets out to find their mother, leaving the kids in a friend’s deserted house with some food and money, enough to last until he returns, supposedly.

Book cover: Penguin Random House.

The kids encounter a horse nearby, who is scheduled to be shipped to an abattoir. Bri teases Rose about not knowing the meaning of “abattoir,” which is typical of the focus on words and their meanings throughout both novels. Rose of course falls in love with the horse, whom she names Gliff. Because this word is obscure, Bri tells their sister it’s a great choice—the name could mean nothing or anything.

When Leif fails to return, the kids take off with Gliff. They encounter of series of dystopian episodes as “UV” (unverified) people, before eventually making their way back to their original home.

But that house is now gone; a kind of AstroTurf, which Gliff attempts to eat, has replaced it. Gliff has earlier described how the kids’ original house was surrounded with a painted red line, which turned out to be a prelude to its destruction. UV people and their homes are not tolerated under the current regime. During their visit, Bri is captured by the authorities while Rose manages to escape.

We then segue to a new time frame, some five years later. Bri has suffered a series of traumas at the hands of their captors, including sexual abuse. Bri is now labeled a “he” and is eventually given a managerial role in a horrendous factory, where UVs are made to undertake ghastly, dangerous, disfiguring work. Rose had managed to escape when Bri was captured and has now disappeared.

Bri has to completely close off their own personality to do the managerial work they were assigned. Eventually they can’t, and they rebel instead. Bri and Rose are not reunited, but it’s implied that Rose is still alive and the novel concludes on a hopeful note.

Glyph (thanks to NetGalley for the advance look) features Petra and her younger sister Patch (Patricia). Here, the girls endure the long illness and then the death of their mother. At their mother’s funeral, the girls are told two war stories by relatives that disturb them for the rest of their lives. The first concerns a man completely flattened by tanks on a roadside in France during wartime. The second is about a soldier who was executed for disobedience because he refused to kill a horse blinded by gas in the war.

As children, the older Petra protects and comforts her younger sister, inventing imaginary conversations with the flattened man and the blind horse to let Patch know everything turned out OK in the end.

The latter half of the book features the sisters as adults, who are estranged for some reason. They are reunited when an imaginary horse shows up and destroys Petra’s bedroom, and Petra reaches out to her sister for help. The reader is now situated in our present.

Billie, Patch’s teenage daughter, is the catalyst for Smith’s take on the atrocities in Gaza. She witnesses a TV video of a horse emerging from under tons of rubble there:

A horse’s head, the bridge of the nose first, pushes through and out of the pile of stuff and thrashes around.

It is a horsehead made of dust.

Dust and rubbly shapes shake loose down from the ears and off the neck. Front legs are suddenly there and scrabbling, and a broad chest appears, back legs appear, kicking and finding their footing, then the whole brickheap rises like it’s getting to its feet itself, as the horse does, as the horse sheds the broken stuff. Then a horse the colour of stonedust and concrete stands in a pile of broken stones and concrete, dust rising off it like smoke. It shakes itself out of there and stumbles over the stones and away.

There is much more from Gaza, most of it much worse. Glyph does not close on a note of optimism, as Gliff did. Instead, the message seems to be that the horrors in the world today have always been there, and always will be, forever and ever.

Whether you enjoy either of these novels will depend on a few things. Do you have strong empathy? Can you accept Smith’s distinctive blend of humor and horror, coupled with spontaneous invention and wordplay? Are you OK with novelists who directly address the growing political dysfunction around the world? I personally check all these boxes, so I highly recommend these novels. No other writer tackles the world’s current drift toward authoritarianism as frequently and effectively as Smith has done.

If any of the questions above resonate with you, and you’re at all curious, then these novels likely won’t disappoint. Smith is a four-time Booker finalist; given her productivity, she is likely to take that prize home eventually.

Live Free or Lie

The flippant title of this review shouldn’t be used to dismiss Ashland, the debut novel from Dan Simon set in New Hampshire, in its entirety. The book is not without its praiseworthy elements.

Ashland, by Dan Simon — Image source: Europa Editions.

From my own reading notes: “Simon is excellent at depicting rich inner lives. There is a focus on how we interact with the natural world. Portions of Ashland make New Hampshire feel like paradise.”

The noted Colm Tóibín said, “Ashland is remarkable for its range of acutely observed characters and its rich evocation of the landscape and weather of New Hampshire. Dan Simon creates a tapestry of voices and tones with extraordinary skill and emotional resonance.”

I agree with all of the above. And yet, there is also a repetitive and formulaic quality to the characters’ inner musings, mainly having to do with the simultaneous embrace of opposites: I am this, but I am also that. I am happy, but I am not. I am too full of life to live. Etc. This repeated clutching at antitheses to define or underscore meaning becomes tiresome by the second half of the book. And, the flat, declarative language in which opposites are embraced creates a sort of false profundity, the “poetry” that some reviewers have noted.

The book ends rather abruptly, too. When it does, one feels the characters were never quite finished, never fully defined, despite their extensive pondering.

It’s a shame—Mr. Simon, the founder of the independent publisher Seven Stories Press, is obviously a talented writer and his love of the natural world in general and New Hampshire in particular is never in doubt. Edith and Gordon, an older couple who originally met in a 1920s tuberculosis sanatorium, are perhaps the most richly drawn characters here, and the least subject to the criticism leveled above. All in all, Ashland remains an interesting read.

Ashland. Europa Editions. Publication Date: Feb. 17, 2026.

North Sun Review

Even the best titles from small presses struggle for recognition.

Not long ago, I wrote a short overview of American small presses, focusing on seven of them. Today I’d like to look at an acclaimed book from one of those presses: North Sun, or The Voyage of the Whaleship Esther, by Ethan Rutherford (Deep Vellum / A Strange Object, 2025). The novel is noteworthy in its own right, and its trajectory since publication is also illustrative of the role independent publishers play today.

North Sun is a very distinctive book, one with many shapes and meanings. It describes a whaling voyage, beginning in New Bedford, MA in 1878. In some ways, then, the novel might be viewed as a corollary to Melville’s mighty Moby Dick. Well, it is and it isn’t. Rutherford has mastered the language of that era but he has also updated it—the novel is told in brief, episodic fragments, meant, Rutherford says, to evoke the movement of the sea. And roughly midway through the book, it turns into something else entirely.

The first half of this debut novel has already captured the stark, capitalistic ethos of its time and the brutality inherent in the whaling industry. Then it calls upon magic (and a kind of magical realism) by introducing Old Sorrel, a shape-shifting, avenging bird-man-spirit who arrives to protect the two young boys on the ship from further depredations and to punish the rest of its passengers and crew for their unthinking cruelty and environmental exploitation. All while the text remains, as novelist Jennifer duBois said in her review of North Sun, “haunting, hallucinatory, and unrelentingly gorgeous.”

The contrasting narrative techniques between the novel’s two halves make North Sun a book readers are likely to remember, and to ponder. Its resonance helped make it a finalist for the 2025 National Book Awards; it was longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize as well.

OK, then. Here we have a striking debut novel, favorably reviewed by a number of discriminating readers and by Kirkus and Publishers Weekly. A novel that was nominated for some prestigious prizes. And, a novel that was ignored by the majority of mainstream reviewers.

Why? Why no reviews in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal? Why no reviews in the Boston Globe or the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times or the San Francisico Chronicle? Why no reviews in the New York Review of Books or the London Review of Books? How did the New Yorker and the Atlantic manage to miss North Sun? How did the UK’s Guardian?

The problem is twofold, I believe. First, many of the major English language newspapers and magazines are walking a financial tightrope and simply don’t have the reviewing resources to range widely. This is unfortunate, for it means the reviews that are allocated are likely to focus on popular Big Five publishing house titles. Second, even for the publications that do have adequate resources, reviewers’ attention is all too often directed at the steady incoming flow of Big Five titles. For a small house like Deep Vellum and its A Strange Object imprint, it frequently requires advertising and marketing to spread word of mouth and gain notice. It takes money.

Obviously, this is not as it should be. In an ideal world, all reviewers’ antennae would be sensitive to the best books from every publisher. Sadly, we’re not there yet.

Not long ago, I received a fundraising email from Deep Vellum. They needed to raise $25,000 for the rights to use a “National Book Award Finalist” graphic on the cover of North Sun (and they managed to do so). The Deep Vellum website also features a “DONATE NOW!” banner at the top of its home page. The press has published a number of highly praised novels lately (Solenoid by Mircea Cǎrtǎrescu is another example), but funding remains top of mind.

I realize you could argue that the difficulties small presses are having with recognition is not the most urgent problem we collectively face in these ominous and demoralizing times. But small presses play an important role on the positive side of our culture nonetheless, and they do deserve to be supported. What’s more, small press books come with a notable, built-in bonus: start a great read from a valiant independent publisher and you’re bound to feel better, both while reading and for some time thereafter.

P.S. Just two days ago, Literary Hub included North Sun in its list of 43 Favorite Books of 2025. Bravo.

A Short Intro to Seven Small Presses

Try something different….

It’s no secret that the publishing industry (and “industry” is indeed the right word) is under threat these days. People simply aren’t reading as they used to, either as much or as deeply. Only around one in six American adults reads books for fun.

Yet book publishers continue to chug along, placing their bets on popular genres and contributing mightily to social media buzz. The Big Five publishing houses in the U.S., and their multifarious imprints, do publish serious books on a fairly regular basis—prestige is still a selling point, in spite of everything. Yet a substantial majority of the constant stream of new books can be slotted into one formula or another.

That’s where independent (read: small) publishers come in. The indies will tell you to seek out their titles if you want to read what’s really innovative, what’s really important, what really matters. Naturally they do. The thing is, they’re often not far off the mark.

This short intro to U.S. indie publishing will look at seven small houses and some of their representative titles, in an attempt to provide a brief survey of what you might find behind the bestseller lists.

Deep Vellum

Deep Vellum founded in 2013, is a non-profit publishing house and also the country’s largest publisher of literature in translation, some 90 titles in its first five years. The house is based in the Deep Ellum neighborhood of Dallas, Texas, hence the punning name. There is a Deep Vellum bookstore in Dallas as well. In addition to translated books, this indie now publishes fiction, poetry, nonfiction and photography books. And their books can pack a real punch. The novel Schattenfroh: A Requiem, by the German writer Michael Lentz and translated by Max Lawton, has been recently reviewed in the New York Times and the New York Review of Books. The Times called it “one of the great, and greatly demanding, literary pleasures of the year,” and it was greeted in the New York Review as a “bleak, confounding and finally brilliant doorstopper of a novel.”

As if this were not enough, Deep Vellum acquired Dalkey Archive Press in 2020—a renowned indie in its own right. One wonders if the venomous governor of Texas and his right-wing henchmen in the state legislature are aware of this intellectual ferment transpiring right under their noses in the Lone Star State.

Sarabande Books

Nor is Deep Vellum the only well-regarded indie publisher based in a deep-red state. Sarabande Books, founded in 1994, is another not-for-profit literary press in an unlikely location: Louisville, Kentucky. (The house also maintains an office in New York.) Sarabande publishes a wide range of prize-winning writers, and its books are reviewed so frequently that for the longest time I assumed Sarabande was an imprint of one of the Big Five. I recently read and can recommend Paul Griner’s The Book of Otto and Liam, from 2021. George Saunders said of this novel, “It has something important to teach us about our dangerous national addictions to violence, hostile projection, and political polarization and does so in that classic literary way: by making us care deeply about individual human beings.”

Red Hen Press

Red Hen Press, based in Pasadena, was also founded in 1994. Although it too is a non-profit, Red Hen has a number of smaller imprints. Red Hen Press itself specializes in literary fiction, poetry and nonfiction. The Good Deed, by British-American writer Helen Benedict, focuses on the refugee crisis, particularly the plight of women refugees, and was published just last year. It is excellent. Kirkus Reviews sums up its review of the novel this way: “An insightful reminder of our responsibilities to one another, more important now than ever.”

Next up, a handful of lesser-known (but still quite interesting) smaller presses. Let’s take them in alphabetical order, beginning with 7.13 Books.

7.13 Books was named thus by its founder, Leland Cheuk, because he had manuscripts accepted on July 13th on two separate occasions. If you can find a copy of Cheuk’s short story collection, Letters from Dinosaurs (Thought Catalog, 2016), it is well worth seeking out. 7.13 Books focuses on literary fiction. The house began in Brooklyn and is now also based in Pasadena. You may well enjoy the Jackson Bliss novel, Amnesia of June Bugs, which focuses on four characters whose paths cross in New York during Hurricane Sandy. I certainly did, and T.C. Boyle notes that “Jackson Bliss is as verbally exuberant as any writer I’ve come across in years.”

Clash Books

Clash Books, based in Troy, NY, began as a website and evolved into a book publisher in 2017. The house publishes around 20 titles a year, including art books, poetry, fiction and nonfiction. They also have a penchant for horror. Their list is nothing if not eclectic: they publish big, weighty tomes like Mark de Silva’s The Logos (I haven’t yet read it) and smaller titles such as Little Lazarus by Michael Bible, “a little novel of profound wonder” (Southwest Review). Despite its seemingly bleak subject matter (two clairvoyant tortoises who bear witness to centuries of human suffering and then our ultimate extinction), Little Lazarus manages a gentle tone and is quite thought-provoking.

Slant Books

Slant Books, of Seattle, was founded in 2013. It is “an independent, not-for-profit literary press specializing in fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, theology, and belles lettres.” A.G. Mojtabai’s brief 2024 novel Featherless is a representative title and an excellent read. Since Plato defined a human being as a “featherless biped,” Mojtabai uses the designation as her title for this book set in the confines of the Shady Rest Home for the Aged. The Boston Globe said that “Mojtabai has all the gifts of a great writer—the observant eye that misses no nuance of expression; the ear that hears the music and the poetry behind the plain cadences of common speech; the willingness to confront her own primal fears.”

Unsolicited Press

Finally, we come to Unsolicited Press, based in Portland, Oregon and founded in 2012. As you can see, the house’s motto is “no bullshit, just books.” Presumably the “bullshit” refers to the formulaic nature of the majority of titles published by the Big Five. Proudly progressive, Unsolicited describes itself as “rebellious, relentless and philanthropic,” and promotes some of its titles under the rubric “2025 Year of Womxn.” Yet its titles are also remarkably diverse. I’ve read two Unsolicited Press novels recently, Mick Bennett’s Take the Lively Air (2023) and Trevor J. Houser’s The Prumont Method (also 2023). The first is set on the Jersey Shore and concerns a minor traffic collision which escalates into a confrontation between two families, each with its own troubles. The second features “math hobbyist” Roger Prumont, who has created a formula to predict when and where the next mass shooting will occur. Both are enjoyable reads.

Thus concludes our mini survey of America’s small presses. There are many more out there, and quite a few of those are also excellent. There are also some outstanding small presses based overseas. So, next time you’re looking for something to read, try ignoring the Big Five’s hype on social media and seek out something different, and something rewarding, from a small independent press.

Two Quick, Flawed Updates

In the midst of horrendous catastrophes unfolding around the world, here are two little first-world fixes to help resolve issues of minor consequence. Note that both solutions are somewhat flawed, echoing our collective attempts to resolve humanity’s larger problems.

First, a solution for the would-be writers among you who have been following Writeside’s posts on running Scrivener 3 on Linux and have recently run into problems on older hardware. A small group to be sure, but if running Scrivener with Wine has recently stopped working for you and attempts to start Scrivener from the command line have resulted in this

Error of failed request: GLXBadFBConfig

there is still a workaround, courtesy of the Wine forums. Create a text file (without the .txt extension) named .pam_environment and place it in your home directory. The file should contain this line:

MESA_GL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=4.5

and nothing else. Now, log out of your Linux session and then log back in. Scrivener should now work. The catch? Electron apps, such as the Min web browser, will stop working. A klutzy “solution”: move the .pam_environment file out of your home directory (onto your desktop, for example) when you want to run Electron apps and move it back into your home directory when you want to run Scrivener.

The Scrivener logo. Source: Literature & Latte.

Pretty half-assed, isn’t it? Welcome to the way the world works, as per Afghanistan, U. S. infrastructure and climate change.

The second update is more straightforward. Recently, a mail plugin for WordPress (which this site runs on) got a little carried away and sent multiple instances of the last Writeside post, understandably annoying a number of subscribers. To be fair, it was more my fault than the plugin’s, as I draft these posts on a number of machines, all of which are perfectly capable of using WordPress to send mail even when I don’t want that to occur. I’ve tried to resolve this with another WordPress plugin (the aptly named Disable Emails) and I now intend to outsource emails to subscribers using the ubiquitous Mailchimp. This is the free version, so you’ll see lots of Mailchimp branding. But ideally you will only receive one email for each Writeside post, a much-needed improvement. You’ll also be able to choose text- or HTML-formatted email, and you’ll find it much easier to unsubscribe (not that I want you to do that).

The Mailchimp logo. Source: Mailchimp.com.

So there you have it: two tiny, imperfect solutions to minor problems affecting a small number of people. This is how progress takes place.

Scrivener 3 for Windows Released

Finally. After a very long wait, Scrivener 3 for Windows has finally been released. It may be April Fool’s Day, but the official release actually came on March 23. Let’s take a quick look at how it works with Wine on Linux.

There are a few initial glitches, at least on my Ubuntu setup, but they’re easily circumvented. And once you do have Scrivener 3 up and running, it’s good looking and functional. Is it worth the $49 cost? Absolutely; there’s no real competition.

I’ve written a number of posts on Scrivener 3 betas; just search on “Scrivener 3” to find them. Not a lot has changed recently. There’s still an installation error you may need to work around, but once you do you’ll be happy with the results.

Here’s a quick tutorial on installing Scrivener 3 on Linux (in my case, Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS). I’m sure many in-depth reviews will follow in the coming days—for now, the aim is just to get you started.

Download the appropriate version (in most cases, 64-bit) here. Don’t double-click on the downloaded .exe file, though. If you do, you’ll liable to get this error:

Installation error. — You may get an error message when you double click the installer.

Not to worry. Just drop into the Terminal app and navigate to wherever you downloaded the installer. Then use the wine command to install it, like so:

wine Scrivener-installer.exe

The setup wizard should then appear. Just follow the instructions to install.

On my system, the installer has trouble creating a desktop launcher. The workaround, again, is via the terminal. You need to navigate to the install location (.wine/drive_c/’Program Files’/Scrivener3) and issue the wine command again to launch Scrivener for the first time, i.e.,

wine Scrivener.exe

All subsequent launches are easy, at least on a Gnome desktop. Just hit the Super Key and start to type in Scrivener—once the app icon appears (this is actually the Wine icon on my laptop, with a Scrivener caption beneath) select it and hit Enter to launch.

I didn’t find any misbehavior within the app itself on a quick initial tour. It seems to function as it should, and it looks great, just as it does on the Mac.

Composition Mode, with controls and stats on hideaway bottom panel. Click to enlarge.

And there you have it: Scrivener 3 for Windows, fully functional on Linux. Kudos to the Literature & Latte team for maintaining Wine compatibility.

Criminal

As this incredibly dysfunctional and deadly year nears its end, I’ll close 2020’s posts on a personal note: it was a tough year for writing, at least for me.

Many wonderful novels, stories, poems and non-fiction works were published this year, to be sure. Yet I know I’m not alone in feeling the effects of distraction and isolation on my writing. When every day is “Blursday,” it’s tough to focus. Not to make excuses—one must try, and I did. I published a grand total of one poem and one story this year. (Actually, the story won’t appear in Gargoyle until next summer.)

So, not a productive year. I can’t blame it all on the pandemic. Part of the responsibility is mine—I should have found more and better, more consistent, ways to focus, and I didn’t. Part of the responsibility lies with a fundamentally flawed literary marketplace, especially the minor leagues of literary magazines and chapbooks. There are myriad problems here which will likely be the subject of a future post.

The one poem I published, “Criminal,” appeared in the Spring 2020 edition of Poetry Quarterly. I’ll reproduce it below, since its subject matter and especially its title seem relevant to the horrific year we’ve just experienced.

CRIMINAL

I know it was a crime
at least as cold as
the fluorescent light that
bore down on my father’s deathbed.

But I still can’t grasp the
betrayal, or the indifference
that enabled it. No
conscious thought was involved.

Dad had been declining for a year,
dropping faster toward the end,
life’s last, careless insult
a needless broken hip.

It was the fall that did me in, he
told me when I flew out to
see him in San Jose.
When I first arrived his head was thrown back

and his mouth gaped. It was awkward.
He was propped up in the hospital
bed, and later that
day I spooned out soup.

He slurped happily, as though life
hadn’t changed all that much.
But then he knew again
it had—his time was nearly gone.

You’ll stay with me? he asked, eyebrows raised.
I can’t, Dad, I told him.
I have to get back.

He died the next evening,
after I’d returned home.
Distance helped blunt the news.

—Thomas Pletcher

Here’s hoping for a better new year.

Update: Scrivener 3 on Linux

~~Update, 1/30/21: there is a bug in the recent Scrivener 3 betas which prevents Scrivener from launching successfully after installation. You can resolve it by using winetricks to install speechsdk~~. This is now fixed.

It goes without saying that these are troubling times. Politics and the pandemic, bound tightly together in this dysfunctional country, will be with us through the end of this year and well beyond. So let’s focus on something small and potentially positive, only tangentially related to the larger world.

There aren’t many fiction writers who use Linux as a regular platform, I’d wager. Yet there are a few, including me. I believe that open source at its best serves as a role model for how the larger society should function. This quality in itself attracts some socially conscious creative people to the platform. The problem, of course, is that commercial software remains dominant, and not all of it can run on Linux. It is possible to write with existing open source solutions. But the best solution for aspiring novelists is the carefully crafted Scrivener, developed by a small, quality-focused software team at Literature and Latte in the UK. And Scrivener no longer runs natively on Linux.

Good news—Scrivener 3 will work with Wine.

To the company’s credit, a version of the Scrivener Linux beta remains available, and this can interface with the current Scrivener 3 on the Mac by translating documents from Scrivener 2 format to Scrivener 3, and vice versa. But the need to “translate” back and forth is a less than ideal solution.

For a while, Wine had come to the rescue—Scrivener ran just fine “out of the box” on default Wine installations. But that changed sometime back, as Scrivener 3 for Windows development evolved. Wine stopped working, and I turned back to Scrivener on macOS to continue work on my novel. Apple still leads the pack in terms of both ease of use and options for writers (but Linux exemplifies the moral high ground, as noted above).

Now that the new version (20.04.1) of Ubuntu LTS is out, I decided to take another look at the situation, and I have some good news for the small audience of writers on Linux. The latest beta of Scrivener 3 for Windows does run on Wine. You just have to do a little extra work to enable this.

A quick disclaimer: while I worked as a developer for many years, I now focus on writing. As a writer, I can’t afford to be distracted by any particular tool. If something doesn’t “just work,” I’ll find an alternative that does and concentrate on the writing. That’s why I hadn’t wanted to get down into the weeds to figure out all the nuances of enabling Scrivener 3 on Wine. But when I took a quick look, I discovered that things weren’t that bad. My Wine configuration is probably a little wonky, and I’ll likely do a complete reinstall when Scrivener 3 for Windows is officially released, supposedly sometime this fall. But getting the software to work again isn’t all that much work.

Scrivener 3 in Composition Mode on Linux.

The latest beta, 2.9.9.9 (RC9), would seem to indicate that the official release is near (fingers crossed). The beta expires in mid-September. Here’s how to get it working.

If you already have Wine installed, you have two choices: you can create a new prefix for Scrivener, or you can update the parameters of the default .wine prefix. (I’ve tried both, which is why my configuration is not as clean as it should be.) If you don’t have Wine installed, then installing it should be your first step. It’s straightforward, and I won’t describe the process here.

If, like me, you only plan to use Wine for Scrivener and one or two related programs (Literature and Latte’s Scapple “brainstorming” software runs fine on the default Wine install), then I recommend updating the environmental settings for the default prefix .wine to meet Scrivener’s current requirements. The process described below applies to Ubuntu Focal but should be translatable to other distros.

The core requirements are Windows 7 or higher and .NET v4.6.2 or higher (Wine 5.0 will let you use .NET v4.8).

Once Wine is installed, make sure you have 32-bit architecture enabled. This is needed for various reasons overall, and also to register Scrivener. The command is:

sudo dpkg -i –add-architecture i386

Following that, run this:

env WINEARCH=win64

Now you’ll need to install Winetricks. Again, this is straightforward. Once you have it installed, run the following commands. The first one is:

env WINEPREFIX=$HOME/.wine winetricks dotnet corefonts

This is necessary for Times New Roman, the most popular font for submitting your work to publishers. If you already have the font on your system (it might have come with or been installed by another program), you can omit the above command.

Next run:

env WINEPREFIX=$HOME/.wine winetricks win7

And then:

env WINEPREFIX=$HOME/.wine winetricks dotnet48

Now you should be able to right-click on your downloaded Scrivener 3 beta file and use Wine’s installer to install it.

Scrivener will create a .desktop file than you can use to launch the program (which didn’t work in my case, because my overall Wine installation has some issues—as I said, I’ll clean this up when the official version is released). You can then add the launcher as a “favorite” in the dock.

An easy alternative for launching is simply to hit the Super key to bring up Search and type in the first few letters of “Scrivener.” Once you see the program just hit Enter to launch it.

Or, if you like the command line, make a little shell script like so:

!/bin/bash

cd ~/.wine/drive_c/‘Program Files’/Scrivener
wine Scrivener.exe

Then you can run it with:

./scrivener.sh

from whatever directory you placed the script in. That said, a launcher is probably the best way to go and that’s what I’ll use once I clean things up.

And there you have it—a little work, but well worth it for those who want to be able to use the best long-form writing program on Linux.

Learning from The Plague

Several months in, it seems to me that too many Americans have begun to accept the ongoing pandemic as some kind of “new normal.” Perhaps not the millions who have recently lost their employment, and certainly not those who have been directly impacted by COVID–19, but many, many others seem to have become quite acclimated to America’s current state of affairs. This may be due in part to the rash/rush of “openings” in the past few weeks.

Casual accommodation is not a realistic viewpoint, as the majority of American health officials continue to maintain. Not with a death count of more than 100,000 and rising. If you’d like a corrective dose of reality, you could do far worse than read Albert Camus’s classic novel, The Plague. I reread the Stuart Gilbert translation a couple of months back and it is a brilliant work of art and philosophy which goes straight to the heart of what it means to experience a pandemic.

Albert Camus's exemplary novel still packs a punch. Jacket photo: Penguin Random House. — Albert Camus’s exemplary novel still packs a punch. Jacket photo: Penguin Random House.

The novel describes the sudden disruptions, growing fear and increasingly desperate measures taken to fight the invading disease in ways that are now intimately familiar to thinking Americans. Its protagonist, Dr. Bernard Rieux, exemplifies the heroic medical personnel fighting on the front line of today’s pandemic. Moreover, the book is a gripping read in and of itself.

But perhaps the novel’s greatest contribution lies in its depiction of human nature, vis-a-vis the outbreak. While it’s true that the townspeople in Camus’s novel did not have to contend with deluded far-right “patriots” determined to expose themselves and others to the disease in the name of “freedom,” they did have to contend with many other dark strands of humanity. The novel’s invading plague is often cited as a metaphor for the Nazi occupation of France. One might make a similar comparison of the COVID-19 pandemic and what passes for “government” in America today.

Our broken and corrupt national government will certainly need to be dealt with, and soon. But so will COVID–19. The current policies being implemented, especially in Middle America and the South, are not going to work.

Odd as it may seem, reading The Plague today is a strangely uplifting, even hopeful experience. This is because, while it tells stark truths about human nature, it also shows people at their best, as with Dr. Rieux. The book is both cautionary and morally instructive, as shown in its final paragraph:

And, indeed, as he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town, Rieux remembered that such joy is always imperiled. He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.

Do Writers Need Writing Software?

Update, 1/31/2020: it should be noted that the abandoned Scrivener Linux beta, version 1.9.0.1 with no expiration date, is still a valid option. Scrivener 3 on Mac or Windows can export to the version 2 format, which the Linux beta version can read, so you can go back and forth between platforms. At least for now. You’ll want the AppImage version, available here.

Do writers actually need specialized “writing software” such as Scrivener? Or is the publishing industry’s standard word processor, Microsoft Word, sufficient unto itself?

The questions above have been making the rounds for a while now. When specialized software for “creative writing” first began to appear a decade or so back, there was a definite stigma attached to such software by professional writers. This piece in The Atlantic by Scrivener creator Keith Blount, from 2011, sums that stigma up nicely.

Even today, in the third decade of this troubling new century, the question is not entirely resolved. But I don’t believe it remains particularly relevant. Most writers have acknowledged the usefulness of Scrivener and its competitors, even if they stick with Word or (in some cases) don’t use a computer to write at all.

R. O. Kwon, whose debut novel The Incendiaries received very strong reviews, told me she investigated Scrivener but found its complexities too distracting and decided to stick with Word. For her, that was obviously the right choice. Michael Chabon, on the other hand, has credited Scrivener (along with iA Writer, DEVONthink, Nisus Writer and numerous Apple products) in the creation of his work.

The more relevant question today, then, is how can writers make sure today’s technology works for them, rather than the other way ’round. And this question was prompted by a recent experience I had with Scrivener itself, which remains the most popular (and capable) program of its kind.

When I reviewed Scrivener 3 a couple of years ago, I was running it on both macOS and Linux (via Wine). I continued to so until quite recently—the Windows beta ran fine under Wine until late last year (Beta 30, I believe). For whatever reason, the developers upped the .NET system requirements and I have not found a way to get the program running again on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. What’s more, I spent far too much time trying. This was time wasted, which I regret. One should never follow technology down a rabbit hole, and I did precisely that.

It’s true that, these days, every minimally conscientious citizen needs to pay some attention to the software they run, both for ethical reasons and to protect themselves from the surveillance state (and surveillance capitalism), to the extent this is possible. That’s why I recently moved from Android to iOS, and why my main computing platform will continue to be macOS. Apple is not without serious ethical flaws (Asian labor standards, tax policies, Chinese censorship, et al.) but they do seem to be the best commercial platform from the standpoint of privacy and security. And by and large, their stuff does “just work.” I run Linux to avoid being completely captive within Apple’s attractive walled garden.

But since my main focus these days is writing, I don’t have time to screw around with software configurations, as I mistakenly did trying to get Scrivener running again on Ubuntu. Past a certain point, the technology has to defer to the writing. No more Scrivener on Ubuntu unless or until it simply works under Wine, which may very well be never.

And that brings us back to the original question of whether specialized writing software is necessary for writers. From an absolute standpoint, the answer is of course “No.” But from the standpoint of convenience and flexibility, I find Scrivener to be invaluable. Syncing a story or poem from my Mac to my iPhone via Dropbox is an almost ideal way to proofread and revise—there’s something about the iPhone’s smaller screen that enhances focus wonderfully. And as Chabon noted in the interview cited above, Scrivener remains by far the best program for long-form writing.

I’ll still run Linux as an escape hatch now and then, and I’ll occasionally even write on my Linux laptop: LibreOffice Writer is more or less equivalent to Word on my Mac, and there are many open source writing programs that run fine under Linux. I’m disappointed in the Scrivener developers for abandoning their original intention to support Linux and then breaking compatibility with Wine after a long run of successful betas. Such is life; this is definitely a minor first-world problem.

For me, though, Scrivener in conjunction with Word or Writer continues to be indispensable. At least until something better comes along.