Good novel writing software lets you do neat things like track which characters, locations, important items are going to be in which scenes. That’s a huge perk for me. I have trouble keeping track of things like names for the minor characters and where I left those characters if they are left out of a couple chapters.

The software that I’m using (yWriter5) is lets you keep track of each scene in a chapter as it’s own entity. That’s a little overkill for me in this early chapter book because pretty much each chapter is just one scene but would be very helpful in a more complex plot.

The really cool part of using novel writing software is that it lets you keep track of all of your notes, easily bounce from scene to scene, keeps track of word counts of each scene and chapter but then when you are ready to mail it to people to read, you can easily export it to a format that Word can read so that you can email it to your proofreading buddies.

Something like this would be awesome for NaNoWriMo where you have to keep track of a lot of things on the fly as you rush through the first draft.

Have you tried using any novel writing software before? What did you like or not like about it?

Pros:

• Light read. Fast and relatively short.
• Inspiring. It really does make you want to start your own business and live the new rich lifestyle he preaches in the book.
• Great personal touches. The book lives within Timothy Ferriss’s world. He gives very real examples of his very real life. I have no idea how real any of that is but it definitely comes across as authentic and personal.
• Tons of resources listed with websites, phone numbers, emails. If you decide to follow his pattern, you definitely will not be lacking for people to call to get started.

Cons:

• Very targeted business model. Ferriss made his money selling things online running a drop-shipping type of business. It seems a stretch to extrapolate a lot of the information outside of that model.
• First phase is getting your job to let you work away from the office which is not realistic for very many people…unfortunately.
• Just seems too easy. This isn’t really a knock for the book but it makes it hard to take seriously. He almost comes across as too confident that it will work for anybody.

If you are considering buying The 4-Hour Work Week it is available at:

• Amazon (book format): The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich
• Amazon (Kindle format): The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich

Please visit Amazon’s site for more information about the Kindle 2.

All of the sci-fi/fantasy seems to be so over the top, action/suspense based that the characters are often pushed into the background while we get wowed by the tech, magic and world building.

I’ve got to believe that characters in fantasy settings have other personal issues other than their parents died when the hero was a baby leaving him with mysterious origins. Shouldn’t these characters be people struggling through divorce or raising kids or losing their full time job or trying to balance their jobs, hobbies and midlife crises.

That seems like it would be a fun thing to write.

I remember reading a Tad Williams interview where he says that he wrote his fantasy series because he didn’t really like what was out there and figured that he should write something that he would like to read. Maybe I’ve finally find my calling.

Earlier this year, I bought an ASUS Eee PC which has just been incredible for basic web browsing and story writing.

Back in the good ol’ Palm days, I used to buy my books from Fictionwise.com. They are not only still in existance but they have bought up some of the other eBook sellers over recent years.

I decided to look into getting myself set up to read eBook on my Asus EeePC and ran into a quick problem of not being able to install the eReader software that supports the main format that most of the Fictionwise books that I buy comes in. If you happen to buy the Windows XP version of the Asus Eee PC
, this isn’t an issue. The eReader software runs perfectly on Windows.

If you have the Linux version, however, you can run the eReader using a layer of software called Wine. Wine is an easy to install Linux program that allows you to install and run Windows applications. The eReader software works perfectly under Wine. It took me less than 2 minutes to install the eReader software.

So now, in addition to having a great little laptop to browse the internet, check my emails, and write stories, I can also read eBooks which I actually prefer over reading paper books. One of my favorite features is the auto scroll feature which is not available on the Kindle and other pure E Ink devices because of how those readers preserve battery by not refreshing the page except when the user tells it to change pages which leads to amazing battery capabilities.

I expect the Kindle, Amazon’s eBook Reading Device, to become immensly popular over the rest of this year and next. Oprah is starting to promote it and it seems to function pretty amazingly as an eBook reader. I considered going this route but decided that for me, the Kindle was not the best option.

The Kindle does do an amazing job of displaying text and handling all of the functions of being an eBook reader but that is all it really does. For the same price, I can get a fully functioning laptop that would let me read a lot of the same books. I am very excited that the Kindle is about to gain some common acceptance, though. As people grab ahold of any eBook reader, the demand for eBooks in general will increase which will hopefully encourage more publishers to release more of their books as eBooks.

Sony also has an eBook reader. Their Sony PRS-505 Portable Digital e-Reader System will probably not be as common in America as the Kindle but any push for competitors for the Kindle will be good for the eBook industry in general.

Anyway, where does that leave my book.

As of last night, I’m around 21,600 words with a week to go. I spent some time yesterday writing one sentence descriptions of each scene that NEEDS to be in the book to get from where I am to writing “THE END.” Then I wrote a couple of those scenes.

I have about 12 more of those to go. Each will be between 250-1000 words. By Sunday night, I will write “THE END” but the ending will be quite a bit rushed. I should be between 30,000 and 35,000 words which is short but not too shabby.

In the end, I’ll be left with something that I could reasonably edit into a decent novella or spend some time doing some real rewriting and adding to convert into a novel. I’ll let it sit for a couple months before I decide whether to try to clean it up or just leave it as a finished first draft.

Once thing I am learning is that I can reasonably write a rough draft of a novel in a month or two which is just amazing to me. When I done with the project on Sunday, I write a post with all the things that I’ve learned about my ability to write a story and a novel.

Last night brings my grand total up to 18,663. My wife noticed last night that I’ve started calling it my book instead of my story which must be telling of something.

Barring any overseen reasons that cause me to miss a couple days of writing, I should be fine to get my 50,000 words in by the end of the month. My work project deadline is looming heavy though. Especially since I’m probably going to spend most of my “free time” during the last weekend working on the work project which is really going to motivate me to cross 50K before that weekend starts.

I’m pretty happy with my plot right now. I really need to start focusing on introducing the big, big problems and getting the bad guys to really start taking control for a while. I’m still struggling a little bit with whether I’m going to make the good guys have to dodge the bad guys for most of the book or just get captured and have to escape. They both have their strengths and weaknesses within the plot. Since I have several groups of bad guys, I’m leaning towards getting the good guys captured and then have the other bad guys have to work to free the good guys so they can capture them all while the good guys have to try to break free from all of them. We’ll see. I’m sure it will turn into a nice mess either way.

My biggest realization from last night is just how much dialogue I’m really using. That doesn’t really bother me, though, because I don’t spend much time letting the narrator say things like, “Tom wondered if Sally liked his sandwich.” I’m more likely just to have Tom ask about it.

Outside of the dialogue, there are tons of descriptions of movements of the characters. I’m still doing a horrible job of describing the sights, sounds, smells, etc. I can already tell that the story would get a massive improvement if I spent a day or two adding one or two sentences of these type of details to each paragraph which might be a fun way to take a break from the plot and still get a lot written some day. It will also be at the top of my priority list if I ever decide to edit this into a polished version after the rough draft is done.

16,667 is the barrier that I will cross tonight. Since I’m conceptually dividing the plot into thirds this means that starting tonight, I need to start working on the middle portion of the plot. And that is not something that I am very good at. I always no how to start a story and can normally finish it but have a hell of a time dancing around in the middle.

Fortunately, the two scenes that I wrote last night are going to be a big help…and completely accidentally. The one gave a person on one side a definite hint of a backstory with one of the main characters. It happened completely accidentally, too. The main character needed a weapon and this new character was her source. While writing it, I was giving vague descriptions about the new guy and using a fluff name that I can change later. During one of the paragraphs, I was talking about this new character and realized he sounded an awful lot like another vague character that I had introduced earlier. Then I realized that it was because they were the same character. Then I started thinking about it and said, “Wow. That means that one of my main characters has a friendly backstory with one of the bad guys and they are now going to have to decide whether their past is stronger than their present goals.” I couldn’t believe it. It is like a conflict or something. Anyway, now I’m pretty excited about where that is going to head. For the record, none of that would have happened without my weekend away from the main characters.

Then, I was writing another scene with a couple characters that I added over the weekend just for fun and half with the expectation of them going nowhere and eventually getting killed or deleted. They still might get killed but they definitely won’t be deleted. During their normal course of work, pirating of course, they found something interesting. Something that I really needed somebody to spot. They are going to need to steal another ship to investigate but that other ship has already been stolen by the good guys. I really need that ship to have a reason to get to a very specific spot during the climax and I have a feeling these guys might just end up having a lot to do with that….unless I kill them first of course. But either way, now I know how I am going to get a handful of the characters exactly where they need to be when the most main of the main characters does her big action sequence during the climax. All of which is really going to help the last third of the book sound like something more than, “and then the girl did her heroic action fixing all the problems.”

On another note, that makes the third night in a row over 2000 words and the night prior to that I was over 1500. For me, that is really pounding the typewriter. My deficit on my initial pace (caused by the vacation) has decreased from around 7200 words to under 5000 words if I’m reading my spreadsheet correctly. If I can keep getting a couple thousand a night, I really will have a chance of catching up on a big day or two during some weekend. Hmm.

Anyway, my word count for my NaNoWriMo book sits at 14,599 as of last night. Friday I wrote 1554, Saturday 2032 and Sunday 2078. I had hoped to get a few more words written but I also expected to sneak in a few hours of writing in small blocks during the days which didn’t happen. All of that writing occurred between 9pm and midnight on those three days. I was literally so tired by the end of each night that my eyes would close while I was typing, I would open my eyes and have to reread the sentence to remember what I was talking about, and sometimes had to edit out some stream of consciousness/dreaming sentences. Cool stuff.

Before the weekend started, I realized that my current characters and plot were not going to fill 50,000 words. I had one main story arch and the main characters only had side plots based strongly off of the main plot. So this weekend I wrote zero of my 5500+ words about the main characters. I took one very minor character (a bad guy) and wrote a couple scenes with him. While writing those scenes, he had to interact with another set of characters who now have a brand new subplot that is going to mix in very nicely with the main characters and cause them lots of problems. I also added a plot line that had absolutely nothing to do with the main plot or characters at all and wrote a couple thousand words on them. The two characters in that one really need to get away from their little problem and it will throw them into the path of the others but I’m not sure if they will help or hurt or even which characters they will be interacting. But they are kind of fun so they can hang out for a while.

All in all the opening third is much fuller now with some definite reasons for everybody to be in the book and some definite explanations about why they will all be interacting against each other. There are 5 different groups all moving around on the stage and none of them like each other at all.

Now that I’m nearly a third of the way through the book, I think I’m ready to get everybody to really start interacting and letting the problems grow for both the good and the bad guys and hopefully get them all moving to where I want them before I start writing the last third.

I’ve kind of hit a happy rhythm with the 2000 words a night. I seem to be writing either 500 word or 1000 word scenes and seem to be able to get all of that written between 9pm and midnight which is a window of time that I have fairly safely carved out for myself. If I can keep on that pace, I will make the 50,000 NaNoWriMo goal by the end of the month without needing to do a massive catchup day anywhere along the way.

As I approach 10,000 words, I’m noticing a couple of the plot lines really starting to get ready to go haywire. The bad guys are definitely going to make their presence felt in the next couple thousand words and change everybody’s course of action. They are currently literally looming on the horizon. I need to work on some smaller problems for each of the characters, too. Only one of them at this point actually has something problematic outside of what will be the main problem.

I need to do a little work over the next 5-10 thousand words of getting the people who actually reside where the story takes place more involved in the plot. The current stars of the book are all from a different place. I do have a couple local characters who have joined those teams but I want to work on some other locals doing their own independent local thing and getting mixed into the plots as their own standalone threads.

Also, I’m pretty confidant I know how the last 10K words or so are going to go for most of the major plot lines.

Which just leaves me with needing to develop about 30K of the middle of the story. Consider this my mental note to not rush the resolution of the problem. I need to give the bad guys plenty of room to cause their trouble and the good guys plenty of opportunities to try and fail (or at least just win the little battles) before we get to the end.

Finally, I finished reading the No Plot? No Problem! semi-official guide to surviving NaNoWriMo book. It seems to do a good job of describing the pressures that will hit at various stages of NaNoWriMo and offers tips and encouragement for surviving them. The book might not make anybody a better writer, but it could help many people actually finish their rough drafts which in and of itself will probably help people become better writers, I guess.

Oh yeah, one more writing type of thing. I had been using JDarkRoom up until yesterday. I really enjoyed using it and will continue to use it for projects in the future. But yesterday, I switched the story to OpenOffice which I have been using for years. No real reason for the switch but now that I’ve made it, I’m planning on sticking with it for the rest of the story.

I also have proof that I have officially turned off my Inner Editor. When converting from the JDarkRoom file to the OpenOffice one, I played around with some things of the nerdy variety that had nothing to do with actually converting the file. I realized that I somehow managed to clobber a whole bunch of paragraph breaks giving me crazy run on paragraphs and even chapter/section breaks that are just not there anymore. And I’m just leaving them for now. And stay locked up in that closet, Inner Editor.

I’m also accepting names for characters. About once every couple days I make my wife think up a name to use for some new character. Almost all of the characters have a certain amount of bad streak in them. And I still am just using placeholder names for the 16-18 year old brother and sister main characters. I could really use some names that would be good for pirates if they used non-piratey kind of names, if that makes any sense.

Right now I am somewhere just over 6000 words if I remember correctly (I don’t have my text handy at the moment). I think I’m about 5000 words behind pace which isn’t surprising considering the vacation. What is surprising is that I actually did some writing while away and started back up with some writing when I got home. I figure if I can keep slightly ahead of pace for a few days and then have a couple really big days on the weekend I should be back in the ballgame. So, I’m slightly nervous but nowhere near panicking yet.

I also started the book with virtually no notes, outline, plot or even characters.

Since then, I have found an ending, discovered a couple new characters (in addition to the 4 characters that I sent into this mess), not wanted to kill any of the main characters yet, and have several different people/groups with an interest in getting to the final scene alive and on top.

The biggest problems are that I have not really found a style (some scenes are extremely short while others are much longer), most of the characters change the way they talk virtually every time they open their mouth, I bounce from pages of dialogue followed by pages of no dialogue (when I actually take the time to make people do something instead of just sitting around yapping), and overall I’m doing a fairly horrible job of describing where this is all taking place.

But all of that can get sorted out on the second draft. I’m still having fun and still looking forward to writing the ending. Now I just need to start figuring out how to get all the people where they need to be for that ending. I also need to jot down some quick outline notes so I can keep track of who has been doing what so far, what I named them, and some ideas on what needs to happen to them over the next 10K words which should get me about a third of the way through the book.

I’ll let you know how it is going as it happens.