Helpful software or sites?

[Marie Dees]

Hi all,
I'm giving a presentation on Technology for Writers at the Florida Writers Conference this November. I'm still collecting references to any software or sites that people use to help them during the creative phase of writing. These would be those that help you write or stay organized or even share with other writers (CCS would be one of those). There are a couple of other people doing talks on websites and marketing so I don't need those ideas as much.

So, do you have any programs or sites that you use and cherish as part of your creative process?

[Dan Goodwin]

Hi Marie, I'm rather primitive in this area, for article writing ideas I used a basic text editor - TextEdit - and MS Word to write the actual articles. For creative writing, my best work usually comes with pencil and paper, then the final edit typed in Word.

I had a little browse on Twitter Search to see what people were talking about, and it turned up some interesting links. Try these two searches:

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%22writing+program%22

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=writers+software

Dan

[Anne Westlund]

CCS! I just started using Microsoft Works for daily reminders. Works pretty good, although I have to be on the computer.

[Valerie K]

My suggestions are freebies, since that's where I am, budgetwise.

My all-time favorite software for writing is a freebie called yWriter:

http://www.spacejock.com/yWriter4.html

It's written by a sci-fi writer and programmer in Austrailia. It has built-in organizational software which makes it easy to break a book into chapters. It saves in RTF, but you can easily export the text into Word for formatting. If you tool around Hal's site, he also has other useful programs like a submission tracker, timers and text readers. I find text readers (programs that read text out loud) useful for catching typos. Here's another reader (free version available):

http://www.readplease.com/

This is Free Mind, mind-mapping software (still hasn't replaced pen and paper clustering for me, but might be useful to someone) :

http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

For writing film scripts, a totally awesome program is:

http://celtx.com/overview.html

Not only a fully dedicated script/production program, but comes with web-based backup and community. The only drawback I can see is you can't easily export your script to another word processor, but you can generate it as a pdf. (This may have changed, I don't know.)

Some of these programs (mapping, reading out loud) are available as web-based apps now. I always go nose around the NaNoWriMo tech forums and see if any new software has shown up.

Hope this helps,

Val K

[Lin Neiswender]

yWriter4, FreeMind, Rough Draft, Writer's Cafe (trial version), Google Notebook

[Bev]

First post - Hi!

Liquid Story Binder is the best I've tried - and I've tried quite a few - http://www.blackobelisksoftware.com/

I believe there's a 30 day free trial which actually translates to 30 uses.

Bev

[Carol@Swallowcliffs]

I think this is an interesting site:

http://phrontistery.info/index.html