Tool Guy wants to know: What writing software do you use?

[Kathryn Lilley]

After Clare's dreamweaver post yesterday, I thought I'd slam us back to earth with some Tool-Guy talk (okay so I'm a Tool Gal, but honestly. who bothers to check under the belt?). Read post.

[Bob]

Great products John, and most of those are free. I like free.
Smiles
Bob
Oh the yWrite site has another download called Sonar3. A great tool to use for submitting. You can paste all the contact info, guideliness from the site into the tool. Then when you submit, you can track the submissions. Having the guidelines in one spot saves tones of time and possible errors
on submissions, which we all know gets fast rejections.

[Kathryn Lilley]

Cool, John! You're a real Tool Guy! I've got Liquid Story Binder on my PC for a test drive right now. I like the sound of that SuperNotecard too, since I'm always losing track of my Index cards.

[John Dishon]

One more thing.

bubbl.us. This is a site for online brainstorming (web outlines). It's pretty neat.

[John Dishon]

If you want more programs to check out, try these:

Q10 (full screen text editing, bare bones but good for cutting down on distraction, plus has word count and you can set writing goals)

WriteMonkey (basically like Q10)

Rough Draft (akin to yWriter)

An article about Rough Draft: http://becoming-a-writer-seriously.com/wordpress/2007/02/07/alterna...

yWriter

Liquid Story Binder (Another great thing about LSB is that you can install it on a USB drive and take it with you and run the program on any computer from the USB drive)

SuperNotecard (Use virtual notecards to organize your novel)

OpenOffice.org (alternative to Microsoft Office)

AbiWord (Word processor alternative to Word)

Celtx (More geared towards screenwriting, but you can use it for other things as well.)

[John Dishon]

No matter what program I use, I compulsively ctrl+s. Auto save can be bad so I always save constantly. I haven't used Word 2007, but I've had problems with every version of Word I have used. Word is also weird; it's the standard used by practically all businesses yet Word doesn't handle formatting very well. Even an .rtf file, which by design is supposed to retain formatting, Word can't handle correctly. It always changes something. It's not always something major, but it's still annoying. Word also doesn't always display open-type fonts correctly, though OpenOffice.org does.

So for people used to Word, OpenOffice.org is a good alternative.

[Kathryn Lilley]

Good feedback, thanks, John! Word's been crashing on me a lot too, recently. Enough to make me very wary of it. It seems like it's been doing it more ever since I upgraded (not by choice, by my day-job's mandate) to Office 2007. I send my manuscript to myself every day, but I've still had situations where I've had mid-paragraph crashes and lost a few hours worth of changes. Not lovin' it.

[John Dishon]

I recently bought Liquid Story Binder and I love it. yWriter is good software too and it does about the same thing (less features though) and it's free. I like LSB better because of the design and the visuals of the program, but yWriter is great software too. Another good thing about LSB is that future upgrades and updates are absolutely free. When you download the new version, it automatically installs over the previous version, without deleting the files you have there.

Before that I used Microsoft Works (the standard alternative version of Word that comes on new PCs.) I prefer it to Word because it's less bloated and less buggy (I've have Word crash on me repeatedly for no apparent reason).

[Bob]

Tools are great...after your done writing the novel.
Smiles
Boib