I sound like an advert there. But hurry – stocks can’t last forever! Before I say “but you do have to be quick”, remember that Scrivener has gone on sale before. Usually only through bundles or other deals as it has today with MacUpdate, but it has gone on sale.

So presumably it will again and I loathe how the words “but hurry” work on our minds: a company sets a completely self-imposed deadline and it works. But every firm does that and this one has a great product which is briefly on sale. At time of writing you have one day and about 13 hours in which to buy Scrivener for 50% off.

Here’s what it is:

Scrivener is a powerful content-generation tool for writers that allows you to concentrate on composing and structuring long and difficult documents. While it gives you complete control of the formatting, its focus is on helping you get to the end of that awkward first draft.

Literature and Latte, makers of Scrivener

That’s a “yeah, but” kind of description: it does tell you something but it doesn’t convey much. It’s also a “yeah, and” kind of description because it doesn’t convey why you would want such a thing. So let me have a go, with one caveat.

I don’t have Scrivener.

I bought a copy for my wife Angela Gallagher and I tried it out with her. At first it felt like just another word processor but then its way of letting you throw thousands of things – text, articles, websites, images, anything – together into a project and sort it out was really impressive. I’m working on a book with someone and after lots of oddities in our email conversations where some chapters just wouldn’t arrive she’d have to resend them and it’d be out of order. Or often she rewrote some parts and sent me the new versions. I was really struggling to get a grip on what had been written and what was ready, what hadn’t and what wasn’t. Scrivener let me piece it all together in the right sequence and have an actual book at the end of it.

I’d have gone upstairs to my office iMac and bought my own copy there and then.

Except.

I am still working on this book. We are still working on it. Chapters go back and forth plus, the day I was doing this compiling of materials, I was doing it because I was going to stay with the writer and we needed to go over a lot of things.  You can’t collaborate in Scrivener. I had to take everything out and put it into Word so that we could work together and I could track changes. Actually, I put it into Word for her and Pages for me, but it couldn’t stay in Scrivener. Actually II, it was Scrivener that made it particularly easy to output the work to Word and Pages. Without it I’d be copying and pasting to this day. With it, the whole process felt relaxed and enjoyable.

So much so that I know I will buy Scrivener for my next project. But that’s not here yet.

All of which was by way of explaining to you why I feel I can enthuse about Scrivener as much as everybody else does, even though I haven’t got it. I was going to tell you all that and then go into why Scrivener is so good. But I think I’ve told you now.

So go take a look at the deal while the clock is running, okay? The regular price is £31.99 UK, $44.99 US so if you get in before the MacUpdate deal ends, you’ll have it for about £15.99 UK, $22.50 US. But you have to go now and you have to go via a deal on MacUpdate here.