[I installed OpenID capability on the blog today. Took about 30 seconds. I love Wordpress.]

Yesterday I grabbed some screenshots from Scrivener, now that I actually have content in it—click the images for larger.

I thought I’d use the supercool note cards on cork board to actually outline my shit for a change, but no—I fill them out as I’m writing the chapter or after it’s done. (Still a handy thing, though, when it comes to looking back through chapters for a specific detail.)

Each note card corresponds to an actual document (in this case, each document is a chapter, but they could be scenes or acts or parts—and chapters can have scenes under them, parts could have chapters under them—however you want to organize your work). It doesn’t seem like a bunch of separate documents, though, because they’re all right there; you just click from chapter to chapter. Or you can select some or all of the chapters and click “Edit Scrivenings” to work on them as (seemingly) one document.

I like how I’m able to customize the “labels” for the cards. I’ve set mine up to track POV; that’s why there are alternating push-pin colors on the cards; purple pins are Derek’s POV, and red ones are Eddie’s.

I haven’t done a whole lot with the character section. There’s not much more on the info pages for the characters than you see on the note cards in the screen cap. Alan’s info page, for example, just has an extra detail about a pet rat. It is handy to have a place to stick that info; I just, well, like with the outline, I keep most of that information in my head. (It’s also nice to have a place to stick Sims Body Shop representations of the characters. I can do the same thing with locations—stick in a blueprint of the textile mill or a photo of a maintenance floor hatch on a bus, etc.)

On the right-hand side about halfway down in this screen grab you can see a “Document References” section. This is cool. You just drag stuff over from the left-hand side, any stuff that pertains to the scene or chapter. Then when you’re writing, you can quickly access that data without having to scroll for it. Even better: you can include website URLs, so your web research can be connected to your project.

If you click the little notepad icon at the bottom of the Document References section, the Document Notes section opens, which is also really handy. I’ve been in love with being able to add quick notes for something I’m writing since I first used Rough Draft four years ago, so it’s always nice to be using a program that allows that. (When I’ve used MS Word, Q10 and other word processors that don’t have that capability, I put notes right in the middle of everything, bracketed and in all caps. It’s not as neat a solution.)

I love Scrivener. Unfortunately this super awesome program is only available for Macs. Windows users can check out yWriter, though, which has the extra benefit of being free.

And now I’m gonna fire Scrivener up and pass the 30K mark on this book….

A friend of mine created The Prompt Machine for band fiction writers. It can be used for other types of stories, too—just skip over the zombie groupies and broken-down tour bus type prompts. The only problem with The Prompt Machine is that you end up laughing your ass off instead of writing.

Storybase.net is a somewhat similar toy, with a wider scope and not so many laugh out loud moments (but there are a few).

It’s a little confusing when you first go to Storybase.net–what on earth are you supposed to do? Click the little “How to Use” link underneath the logo in the upper left and you’ll find out it’s pretty easy. For instance, say I have two characters—we’ll call them Peter and Robert—and I decide that Peter’s mindset is “paranoid” at the moment. In the “Type Your Characters” section, I change Archetypes to Custom Names and type Peter and Robert’s names in the boxes below that, then I click “Update.” Whoever’s in the leftmost box is who the “Mindset” will refer to, so to make Peter paranoid, I make sure his names in the leftmost box. Then I change the “Mindsets” drop-down box to “Paranoid.” Storybase.net presents me with a list of “prompts.” Here are a few:

• Peter spies on Robert
• Peter senses Robert becoming suspicious
• Peter senses that Robert has a hidden agenda

Alternately, I could have chosen an action instead of a mindset. Here are a few prompts I get from the “Death” action:

• Peter finds Robert’s corpse
• Peter is horrified to see Robert get killed
• Peter nearly dies as a result of Robert’s mistake

You can add a third character. Here’s “Paranoid” again, with Robert in the leftmost position and Nick added:

• Robert senses something going on between Peter and Nick
• Robert is unsure whether Peter is telling the truth about Nick
• Robert seeks protection from Peter after being threatened by Nick

Or you can drop it down to one character:

• Robert is buried
• Robert is forgotten
• Robert pretends to be the person Robert has killed

It’s a fun way to brainstorm or to unstick yourself and get writing again. Give it a try!

If all you need is a simple word processor to get your writing done on, here are some choices.

Q10 (Windows)
I used this for NaNoWriMo last year and loved it. Here’s why:

1. It goes full screen, blocking out all the other usual computer distractions.
2. You can set a timer–great for “word wars” with yourself.
3. It makes old-fashioned typewriter noises when you type (no “ding,” though, when you hit the “enter” key).
4. You can have it keep track of “partial counts,” which for my purposes meant that I could know how many words I’d written so far that day just by glancing at the status bar.

The downside is that it can be buggy. Three or four times during NaNoWriMo, it decided it wouldn’t let me save the file I was working on anymore unless I saved it under a new name. Every now and then the word count stats (including the one that told me how many words I’d written that day) would stop dead (but it only takes a keystroke to start it back up again). Finally, the alarm wasn’t all that reliable. It would just sometimes…forget that the alarm was set? I don’t know. I would still use the program again, though, for NaNoWriMo, and in fact I wrote the first draft of my xmas_rocks story with it late last month.

Like the other programs I’ve mentioned recently, Q10 can be run from a USB flash drive.

Writeroom (Mac) and Darkroom (Windows)
Like Q10, these programs (Darkroom is a clone of Writeroom) run full screen, getting rid of all other distractions. They’re word processors stripped down to the very basics.

RoughDraft 3.0 (Windows)
RoughDraft offers more features than any of the above, like rich text (RTF) capability, a sidebar “pad” for story notes, and the ability to have several documents open at once in tabs. It also has a “screenplay” mode for easy formatting of scripts. I’ve used this program a lot in the past, particularly because of the ability to make story notes alongside the story.

Zoho Writer and Google Docs and Writeboard
You don’t even have to carry a flash drive around if you use these online word processing applications (however at the moment you do need to be connected to the Internet if you want to work on your story via Google Docs or Writeboard; Zoho Writer, on the other hand (and ironically) uses Google Gears to allow you to work on your Zoho documents offline). All three of these systems are especially well suited for collaborations. And hey…now that I’m thinking of it…I bet these systems offer a great way to share stories, too. Like this!