Annotating a manuscript

I’m about half-way complete with the second draft of my work in progress. I’ve worked all the notes from the first draft into this draft, and although I found it more complicated than necessary, I generated an ePub from the manuscript which I loaded onto my iPad. As I read through the scenes, whenever something felt awkward or unnecessary, I highlight it with my Apple Pencil, then added a note.

You can see the process in the video below, where I do the same with HG Wells’ Time Machine, although I would never presume to provide editorial notes for this classic.

Once I finally finish reading through my manuscript — you must believe not every page is a complete wall of yellow highlights — it’ll be time to slide back over to my Mac where the alleged magic happens.

Over the last few days I wrote a small application to fetch the annotations for a book and make them easily available to the revision process. In the ideal world, the application would list all the annotations, and if I clicked on one, my Mac would switch to Scrivener where the annotation would appear. However, Scrivener doesn’t support automation of any form — how sad! — so I need to find an alternate flow.

When you launch the application and load your book, you’re asked to grant access to two protected resources: the index of books and annotation database. These are resources that Apple Books maintains in a secure location — but not undisclosed — and, if you have iCloud enabled, keeps in sync between your iPad and Mac.

Once you grant access to those resources, the application thinks for just a moment, before displaying the annotations you’ve made on your manuscript.

You can see at the very end of the video, I clicked on the first annotation. This copied the following text to the clipboard:

The Time Machine was gone!

If I was writing the Time Machine and had it open in Scrivener, I could use Quick Search (^+⌥+G) to find the passage in the manuscript. Because I sometimes highlight large blocks of text for rewriting, the application only copies up to the end of the first paragraph. But that’s more than sufficient.

I’m not quite ready to make this application available to fellow writers, but I hope, once our upcoming move is complete, to polish it up and make it available. Stay tuned.