When she’s not working part-time on the L&L support team or doing schoolwork, Alex is a full-time hobbyist. She dabbles in poetry and fanfiction, plays several instruments rather badly, practices her best yoga poses and plays around with coding and Photoshop.

Alex is proficient in English and French, and sometimes attempts to read Voltaire untranslated before getting intimidated and re-reading the Percy Jackson series instead. She’s switched her major three times and is currently pursuing psychology, though she hopes to one day be a young adult fiction novelist if she can ever learn to finish the things she starts.

Alex lives just outside Toronto, Canada with her beloved German Shorthaired Pointer, Norman.

In customer support for Literature & Latte since 2012, Astrid has sent more than a quarter of a million replies to users, in the process wearing actual holes in two successive keyboards. When she next replaces her laptop, she plans to reinforce the keytops with duck tape.  Preferably with pictures of ducks.

She reads anything and everything, fiction and non-fiction.  Jerome K Jerome’s “Three Men in a Boat” makes her laugh; Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” makes her cry; and Hilary Mantel’s “A Place of Greater Safety” makes her want to rise up, go back in time, and become a French Revolutionary.

David joined Literature & Latte back in 2008 and looks after all vendor relationships, sales reporting, and our social media presence. Having studied physics at university, he now enjoys applying none of that knowledge. Cosmos remains one of his favourite books, with any new release by Murakami being bought as a hardback. He used to enjoy disappearing for months at a time travelling, but with Scrivener to nurture, and five young children, he’s now content with a more homely life. Still rues the day that he decided to write a travel journal on a Psion, losing all those words one cold night in India, but wholeheartedly recommends Scrivener for the task. Lifelong friend and confidant of Keith.

Ian began writing about himself in the third person several years ago on the back of his first novel, the technothriller Deja Vu. Since then, he’s published three more novels—two follow-ups to Deja Vu, as well as a coming-of-age comedy called Proper Job, set in Cornwall and about the surprisingly dangerous job of ice-cream van driver. He’s also had short fiction published in an anthology alongside Christopher Priest (who, in his defence, wasn’t aware of it at the time). Deja Vu has been optioned for movies several times but never made—why not make a ‘deja vu’ joke about it when you see Ian next? He loves that!

Having completed rather more than forty successful orbits of the sun, Ian decided that the challenges of his day job as an academic researcher and department head in a small, south eastern UK university were likely to be roughly similar for the next twenty years at least, so he packed it all in for his first love: bothering computers. Because his MSc in Computer Science required an internship, he made a short list of the companies whose products he admired. To his surprise, Keith, from company number one, got back to him, and the rest is employment history. Ian’s now working on macOS/iOS products, notably Scapple.

He writes every day; first drafts always on pen and paper. Sometimes crayon. For spare time reading, Hemingway is towards the top of the list. Dan Brown—sorry, everyone—towards the bottom. A new Stephen King is an automatic buy. Likewise Rose Tremaine. William Gibson is a constant delight, and Tolstoy a constant headache (how do people remember all the characters? Scapple?).

Most interesting novels he’s read, in no particular order: The Darkness of Wallace Simpson; The Hollow Man; To Kill A Mockingbird; Dr Zhivago; Slaughterhouse-Five; True Grit; The Salmon of Doubt. Ian has read the Aubrey-Maturin sequence of novels by Patrick O’Brian twice, and is halfway through them again, but still gets seasick. He once almost vomited rotten shark over the Icelandic Prime Minister. He plays piano and guitar with two friends in a band called Serendipity, and fosters cats for Cats Protection because if there’s one thing he learned during that MSc, it’s that all programmers should have a cat. And know what recursion is. And have a cat. And know what recursion is.

Index cards, Moleskines, Space Pens, Gillott nibs & J.Herbin ink, text files, shorthand, Markdown, AlphaSmarts and Scrivener. Ever since first picking up a fat Crayola and slashing a rune on a nearby wall (the critics were very harsh on that one), Ioa has been fascinated by the process of writing and the tools we use to do it, almost to the exclusion of writing anything at all.

Ioa has been contributing to the Scrivener project (formally and informally) since before its initial launch, first as a general pestilence of feature ideas, as AmberV on the software forums, and now by heading a talented group of people providing tech support for the software to countless writers every day, writing its documentation and working closely with the developer on the design of Scrivener and Scapple (by yes, still being a pest).

After two years of nameless gofering, Jennifer was officially made “‘Windows project liaison’ or something” in 2013. Her work for Literature & Latte consists mainly of breaking things in creative ways, pestering the Windows developers, and making Keith say “Argh!” She uses Scrivener and Scapple on all their platforms, heads up Windows support, writes stuff, and sneaks Oxford commas into the documentation. When not wrangling bugs, users, developers, or children, she creates fictional characters and tries her skills on them.

She’s partial to Wimsey, Jane Austen, To Say Nothing of the Dog, The Perilous Gard, and happy endings.

From finance and investment to project management and strategy, Julia takes on the background jobs that come with running a business – which is lucky, as they’re the ones the other members of the team don’t really fancy doing.

Her official responsibilities cover public relations and marketing, but a love of planning and directing means she also spends much time herding the senior members of the team in and out of meetings, making them talk to the public, and sending them annoying reminders of outstanding work to be done.

At the top of her ever-changing pile of favourite books is anything by Margaret Atwood and Joseph Heller’s Something Happened – darkness, disaster or dystopia feature high on her reading list, though she’s also partial to anything set in post-War Germany.

When not helping Scrivener users, Katherine’s own writing spans the range from fiction set in historical places that never were, to technology journalism about things that might be in the future. The associated tendency to wander off on research tangents requires close monitoring by her local supervisor (see photo).

Struggling to write a novel and a thesis, Keith began to dream of his perfect writing software, a tool that integrated composition, outlining and research. When, after a futile search, he realised it didn’t exist, he set about designing it himself. There was just one problem: he wasn’t a programmer. He was a primary school teacher with an arts and humanities background. Still, for a long time the idea niggled at him, until in 2004 he taught himself to code. Two years later, Scrivener was born.

Thanks to an affliction of indecisiveness, Keith has about 100 books in his top 10, among them Middlemarch, Madame Bovary, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Princess Bride, and anything by Kurt Vonnegut or Haruki Murakami.

Nicky is from Bulgaria. She has two small children, which are her main occupation at the moment. She has master degree in Egyptology; ancient cultures remain her true passion.

Nicky is a part-time member of L&L’s support. Her greatest motivation in work is the feedback from happy customers.

Utilizing each and every spare minute he can find throughout the day, Oliver enjoys writing the quintessential great American novel that refuses to end with his favorite writing software—Scrivener. When he’s not writing or working, he enjoys spending his time reading an adventurous fantasy novel, playing Mario Kart and Pokémon Go with his family, and visualizing his own intrepid adventures brought to life on the page.

A member of L&L’s tech support team, Ruth’s spare time focuses on her duties as a housekeeper for the two cats that rule her home. She tends to write fantasies or thrillers, although her first publication was a short-story romance. She’s certain that someday Scrivener will help her write a trilogy that reviewers will compare to N.K. Jemisin, Fonda Lee, V.E. Schwab, or Ken Liu. And she’ll get right on that once video game designers stop making so many irresistible titles.

Tiho is Lee’s righthand man when it comes to developing Windows, Linux and Android. He’s a coding Grandmaster – a savant of the C++ programming. Apart from topping his country in Mathematics at university, he has an adventurous disposition with a penchant for ocean kite surfing, and is a pretty handy mechanic.