No takers? OK, I recast the challenge -- use anything you like, just please write a story.
But if you're interested in looking beyond your familiar word processor for other writerly tools, I came across another interesting novel-writing program. (This is creative procrastination for me, as I'm putting off work by helping find ways for you to write. No thanks necessary.
)
yWriter5 is a free Windows program for novel writers. With it you create chapters and fill them with scenes. There's a place to jot down scene goals, descriptions and conflicts. You can track word counts and view a storyboard of what different characters are doing in different chapters. Pretty cool. And free! Did I mention free?
The program was written by Australian programmer and science fiction writer Simon Haynes, who writes the Hal Spacejock series, which I admit I hadn't heard of until now. Though I should probably read it because one reviewer calls Haynes the "Australian Terry Pratchett," and I love Pratchett. (The first Hal Spacejock book is available
free to download and read .)
In my fifteen minutes of using yWriter, my favorite feature is that Haynes has included a sample writing project -- a Hal Spacejock story -- so if you're scratching your head when you create a new project, wondering what to do and how to start (well, that's what I was doing), you can quickly grok how chapters and scenes are organized and edited by loading the sample project. Double-click a scene from the spreadsheet-like view and, bam, you're editing it. Bam!
I finally downloaded the beta trial of
Scrivener for Windows and tried it myself. Wow, that interface is not immediately intuitive. Unlike yWriter, there's no sample project to load and learn from. But there are
video tutorials !
I watched the 10-minute introduction video and the light bulb turned on, the penny dropped. It really is easy to create new scenes, reorder them, color-code their "index cards," mark a scene's status (to-do, first draft, revised draft, done, etc.), and compare current word counts against your target word counts.
It looks like the Windows version is missing some of the features of the Mac version. I didn't see the option to save as epub or change the text and background colors in full-screen editing mode. Maybe they'll be added before the Windows version leaves beta.
I also checked out a
35-minute YouTube screencast on Scrivener that was helpful.
Lynn S. M. suggested finding a Lois and Clark plug for Scrivener along with Bill Henderson's. Well, I did look.
No luck, but
writer Bill\'s site is worth a peek. He's got some ideas about how to conquer that novel-writing procrastination technique known as never-ending revision. I'm sure you guys would never succumb to that. But if you did....
Speaking of procrastination, want to fall down the rabbit hole too, searching for writerly tools? (Though really, wouldn't you rather be writing? As a fan of your writing, I would rather you be writing.)
There's even more software for writers out there! Check out what's available at
www.literatureandlatte.com/links.php www.teresciaharvey.com/hea/software.html http://www.writersstore.com or just google
software for novel writers Some writers blogs mention
Evernote as a useful tool. I've been using Evernote for a while as a general notes database to store recipes, to-dos and work-related reminders. You could use it as a place to keep track of story ideas and plot points. A cool thing about Evernote, besides that it's free (with some features costing $$$), is that there's a parallel Evernote editor on the Web site, and you can create a free account and sync your offline notes with online notes. I've been using it to check the same set of notes whether I'm on my home or office computers.
One of those features Evernote charges for is syncing to the iPhone/iPod Touch Evernote app. I haven't sprung for the monthly fee in order to do that, but it's tempting. However, I have been using
DropBox as an easy way of syncing documents to my iPod Touch. And of course there's
GoogleDocs , the cloud-based, MS Office workalike: You could access your stories-in-progress anywhere you've got an Internet connection.
OK, I'm going back to manually reformatting archive stories now. Only about 2,900 more to go.
Lauren
