Progress update and book-writing software
At this point, we’ve written 42,557 words.
Of these words, 170 comprise phrases or ideas we’ve come up with that we’ll place later.
There are 151 words we wrote as the philosophy of our main antagonist. These 151 words may or may not make it into the finished manuscript, but they provide valuable information for character description.
Finally, 1,204 words linger as “cut scenes”. Our story has evolved to the extent that some of the original ideas either don’t fit, make no sense, or are just plain lame. Sometimes I refer back to those cut scenes and think, “You’re an idiot.”
That brings me to a point about organization. We’ve previously written everything via Microsoft Word. Although it’s a nice word processor with spell check, we needed to find some software specifically designed for novel-writing. We tried separating the chapters by font color and tagging chapters, names and places, but it all became more than we could manage.
I knew we had to get organized with respect to the book. It wasn’t enough that Olivia kept the research straight and managed our binder of information. We needed the ability to structure and rearrange the book at will, including the chapters, the growing list of characters, the scenes, etc. When we decided to switch a scene from one chapter to another, frankly, it became a real pain in the ass.
Organize like a Roadie
I thought of the Roadies at concerts we’ve attended. Now those guys are Organized with a capital “O”. I watched them recently as they switched equipment between bands; every person had tasks and every person performed their tasks accurately and deliberately. Each person stayed out of the way of the others. Change time between bands was minimal because of the precision of the Roadies. We needed that kind of organization.
So we found a novel-writing program that we have settled on for the time being. Please let it be known we are not yet endorsing a specific software. We looked for book-writing or novel-writing software that is free to download and has not been abandoned by its creator. This said, here is what we’re using:
We found the yWriter by Spacejock fits our needs. We are able to organize and separate chapters, scenes, characters, places and more. It is easily editable and backups are quick and easy. The Spacejock software website appears current. Updates are available and easy to facilitate. It’s 100% free and we get nothing for telling you about it. Here’s the website:
Now that it seems we have a handle on a good portion of the mechanics, we’re talking about revealing a little on what the novel is about.