The sounds of silence (and birdsong)

So, we've been quiet little worker bees this week, as you can see- all nose to the grindstone, writing writing writing.

Rachel and I have leaped to over 43,000 words- at this rate, I expect to finish quite possibly by the end of tomorrow. And once I get to my 50,000, I'll only have the extra 30,000 I'm forecasting before I'm finished. Quite possibly not going to happen before the end of November, but the end is so close I can almost touch it (yeah, I see 30K as close).

Anyway! I downloaded Scrivener 2.0 yesterday- I hadn't gotten around to the upgrade yet. And I am *loving* it, even more than the original. There's so much brilliance in it I'm going to have to write a new Scrivener Love blogpost in a few weeks to tell you.

But one of my favourite discoveries yesterday was the fact that you can now import audio and video into your document. Hurrah! I was writing a scene with Len waking up in the military encampment, listening to the sound of magpies, and I was able to pull in an audio file of birdsong and play it in the background.

Here's the great site I found where you can download Australian birdsong. And here's another, with the top 40 birdsongs in the country.

For me, the most distinctive ones that I hear every day, especially out in the bush, are these three, and they form much of the natural music Kit, Len and Bill would hear, too:

Magpie
Australian Raven
Turtledove

After birdsong, I've moved onto battle sounds- about as polar opposite as you can get! I've also found several WWI marching songs, and the sky is the limit from here. Absolutely amazing.

Scrivener's beta version for Windows has just been released this month, too (discount available for NaNoers!). There's a free 30 day trial for either version- seriously, if you haven't tried it yet, You Must. You'll wonder how you ever wrote without it.