State of the Draft, January 2013

Posted on January 9, 2013 by Ashley

Every time I think I’m almost done with my Giant Writing Software Review Post, I find more software, or change my mind about the software I’m using. Then I avoid writing about software at all. Except I love writing about software. So, today, a brief overview on what I’m using to write these days.

Short Stories

As part of The Confabulator Cafe, I write a short story nearly every month — for better or worse. (Which you can find from my website, and on the Confabulator Cafe website) Also, sometimes I write short fan fiction pieces. When it comes to that sort of writing, I want simple. I want distraction-free. I don’t want fuss.

I’ve yet to find the perfect, multi-platform text editor for this. FocusWriter was it for a while, but it crashes every time I run it in Windows 8. When reaching out to replace FocusWriter, I found WriteMonkey and fell in love. So much so that I actually tried to run it in WINE on my Linux machine. (I fucking hate WINE.) When I’m on Linux, I use UberWriter — which I also love. (And is apparently more or less a clone of iA Writer.)

WriteMonkey with Randomly Generated Colors.

UberWriter in Focus Mode.

Both editors have two features that just work for me when I’m in “Just Write!” mode: markdown support and typewriter scrolling. Of the two, I think I like UberWriter a little better because of Focus Mode.

Novels

After diving in during NaNo, I’m officially a Scrivener convert. I feel a little dirty, but yWriter stopped working on Linux, and damn it, Scrivener does it well.

For novels I really need that planning and somewhere to store character & setting notes. Doing it all in one file has pretty much been the best thing ever. Since it offers a functional beta for Linux, I’m able to write on both my computers.

This screenshot would be more impressive if I’d used a different file.

Editing

I’m still a paper editor at heart — red pen just helps me deal. But when its not practical to print out the work, I’m actually sticking with the e-reader thing I ~~talked about here~~ apparently forgot to post about? Basically, I read the story using my e-reader (once the Kindle Keyboard, now a low-end Android tablet) and use the highlight features to make notes/changes.

I’m a sexy beast.

I still have, like, a dozen different programs installed, and I flop around when the craving hits (a terminal-based text editor? OmmWriter? Awww, if you insist.) — but on the whole, this is where it’s going on these days.

hobomama

I was enjoying Scrivener, too, when I used it for my previous NaNo novel, but my WIP is just in Word and I haven’t bothered to transfer it. Definitely want to try it out again, though!

That’s interesting how you edit. I do the commenting and track revisions functions in Word, since that’s where my novel is anyway, as well as saving new copies every once in awhile so I can more easily revert to a previous version.
- http://www.domesticchaos.com Ashley
  
  I’ve never imported anything into Scrivener; I think I tried the very first time I tried it. I got so frustrated that I avoided the program for a year, lol.
  
  I hate reading at my computer, lol, so editing on it is a nightmare.
  
  I was just reading a post about how Chuck Wendig edits the other day, and he does the same thing. I know OpenOffice has a track changes feature, but I’ve never really tried it out — I just start a new copy for each dramatically different draft. I need to look into this track changes thing.