More than a week, or six months.

A few years at least? 

Two years to the day, almost: June 28th, 2023.

Yikes, whatever happened with time?

Yes, I have to humbly admit that I totally lost track of this site and my tech adventures. And no, not because I wasn’t interested in tech anymore. In fact, partially it’s because of my tech adventures….well, that and a permanent detour in adding painting into my daily life, an activity that’s very fulfilling but also time consuming.

But, I realized earlier this week that my interest in technology is as intense as ever. The focus of my attention may have shifted somewhat, but ultimately it’s still there. I mean, last time I posted, AI was still relatively new, now it’s everywhere.

I mean, can you even remember the time before ChatGPT at this point?

But, incidentally, AI is one of the reasons I want to pick up my tech adventures again. Yes, AI is controversial, but there are also some useful aspects that I’d like to explore more.

Of course, there are aspects of Linux I’d like to revisit, grammar apps that have been improved immensely since last and so on. Really, there’s just so much cool stuff out there!

I’m not sure how often I’ll be posting, but I’m going to aim for at least once a month starting out and we’ll go from there.

With that said, Tall Tech Tales is back and hope you’ll stick around for the restarted journey.

With July just around the corner, those of you that are writers may be gearing up for another month of Camp NaNoWriMo activities. Unlike the main event in November when the word count is set to 50,000 words, during Camp NaNoWriMo you are free to set your own word limits, whether it be 5,000 words, 15,000 words or 150,000 words (ok, that one may be a tad unrealistic).

Regardless, if you’re participating in Camp NaNoWriMo, Excel Intelligence has just the tool for you. The Writing Log 3 is a spreadsheet word, project and goal tracker that you can use with Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets, depending on your preference.

With The Writing Log 3, you can define your project for Camp NaNoWriMo and then set a goal for the month. TWL3 will then calculate exactly how much you need to write each day of the month in question to reach your goal. If you miss a day, the daily goal for the remaining days will adjust accordingly to ensure you always know exactly how much you need to write to reach your goal.

Let’s start with your Project. Give it a name, assign the type and genre to the project and determine what stage of the project you’re on. Then, add start and due dates, as well as your project word target. This word target isn’t necessarily the same as your target for Camp NaNoWriMo.

In the columns in light red you can measure your progress and see how much you’ve written, for how long, what your average word count is and how much you have left to write each day until your due date.

Next, your Monthly Goal. Once again, your goal for Camp NaNoWriMo (or any other month) doesn’t have to be the same as your overall project target. It can be less, it can be more. In a way, it’s independent of the project goal.

To set your monthly goal, enter the first day of the relevant month and your word count target for the month. If there are days you know you won’t be writing (such as holidays), mark them with an X. The word/day target will automatically recalculate based on how many writing holidays you include.

The Daily Writing Log is next. This is where you record all your activities for the day. You can record as many sessions per day as you like, they will all be counted together towards your daily goal.

The first six columns (with white background) you fill out. The dropdown in the project column is populated with the names of the projects you add on the Project sheet. The list of activities shown in the next dropdown can be customized on the settings sheet.

At the top, you have some basic information about the goal for the selected month. You can see what your goal is, what today’s goal is and how much you still need to write to reach today’s goal. Note that the data shown here is based on the month you have selected on the next screen, the Monthly Dashboard.

The Monthly Dashboard is where it all comes together: the projects, the goals, the logged sessions. If you select the current month, for example, you’ll be able to see your progress on the right, as well as your daily goal. The goal is what you need to write on any given date to reach your word count target for the month. You’ll notice that any holidays you add on the Goals sheet are excluded from the goal calcuations. Also, if you miss a day, the goals for the remaining days will recalculate and divide the missed goals over the remaining days. On the other hand, if you write more than the daily goal for any given day, the remaining daily goals will be reduced accordingly.

The charts shows some of this data visually, while also giving you information about what weekday is the most productive and the correlation between word count and how much time you spend writing.

The next sheet, the Annual Dashboard, shows you information for your goals for the whole year. You can see how you did each month compared to your goal as well as a comparison of word count to time spent writing.

Finally, the Annual Comparisons sheets lets you compare your writing progress from one year to the next.

Overall, the Writing Log 3, as well as it’s more basic sibling the Writing Log 2, are perfect for not just monthly events like Camp NaNoWriMo and NaNoWriMo, but for your continued writing. The key to a healthy writing habit is to set realistic monthly goals that are achievable. I try to stick with about 500 words per day as a goal, which is about 15,000 words per month. It’s less than the hectic 50,000 of NaNoWriMo in November, but it still means I can comfortably write a novel of 60,000 words in just a few months.

The Writing Log 3 (and 2) can be picked up on the Excel Intelligence Etsy store at the following links and are available for both Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets. Use the code NANO2023 during checkout for a 20% discount!

Over the last several months, the subject of artificial intelligence in creative fields has been in the news almost weekly. Artists have been upset about the implications of graphical AI’s like Midjourney while universities try to limit access to ChatGPT to avoid cheating on exams. I’ve seen AI used to create dating profiles, write resumes for those looking for jobs, and blog content for content creators. I’ve also seen several videos explaining how ChatGPT can be used to create books that can be posted directly to KDP.

Crazy stuff.

But is it? In a way, I’ve already been using AI’s to improve my writing through Grammarly and ProWritingAid. Sure, neither of those actually produces content for you, but there is some sort of AI involved to analyze your writing and offer suggestions. ChatGPT “just” takes it to the next level by actually producing content for you.

Naturally, I had to take a closer look at what I could achieve with ChatGPT. What is actually possible to do with ChatGPT, and how far am I willing to go with AI and my own writing?

Creating Story Outlines

The one thing I’ve always struggled with is creating that first concise story outline from that first sentence. As it turns out, ChatGPT isn’t half-bad at doing this for you. Here’s an example sentence I put in to see what I’d get:

“A story idea about a man that can read memories and transfer them to others.”

It’s a sci-fi type story idea, deliberately vague. Here’s the output:

The main character, Jake, is a man who has the ability to read memories and transfer them to others. He has always kept this ability a secret, but one day he meets a young woman named Sarah who is suffering from amnesia. She has no memories of her past and she is desperate to know who she is.

Jake is drawn to Sarah and he decides to use his ability to help her. He reads her memories and transfers them to his own mind, and then he helps Sarah to remember who she is and where she came from.

As Sarah’s memories return, Jake realizes that she is in danger. She was part of a top-secret government experiment and there are people who will do anything to keep her from remembering what happened. Jake and Sarah go on the run together, trying to stay one step ahead of their pursuers while they search for the truth.

As they travel, Jake and Sarah grow closer and they fall in love. Jake is torn between his desire to protect Sarah and his fear of revealing his own secret. But in the end, he decides to trust Sarah with the truth and he shows her how to use her own memory-reading ability.

Together, Jake and Sarah use their abilities to uncover the truth about the government experiment and bring the people responsible to justice. They finally find the peace and acceptance they have been searching for, and they live out the rest of their lives together, sharing their memories and experiences with each other.

How about that? There’s a bit of romance, there are government secrets, thrills and action. Oh, and there’s a sweet ending. What more could you ask for?

Well, obviously, you could expand on this outline from here. What I’ve found is that if you introduce additional details about the story, such as the personality traits of Jake and Sarah, more information about the secret experiments and so on, ChatGPT will actually expand on the story bit by bit. For example, I spent close to two hours today starting from scratch with a story idea I’ve already started to outline six months ago. I started with the same basic concept as above, slowly adding more information. I found that the initial outline was fairly generic, but as I added more information, it filled the generic aspects of the plot out. 

In the above example, it might be places they travel. It could be the truth they uncover, the people that are after them. I found that with a bit of work, I could get an outline that had the high level details of the beginning, middle and end of the story. Finally, I asked for 50 chapters with a title summary for each. ChatGPT took the summary and broke it down into 50 chapters. Sure, it wasn’t ideal, but it did it.

My conclusions on this point is this: yes, I think ChatGPT can create plot summaries, but you’ll get the best result if you do your story research first. Characters, locations, etc. The more information YOU feed into the conversation with the AI, the better result you get.

Assisting with Plot Holes

I’m currently re-reading a story I wrote several years ago with the aim of completely rewriting it. As I’m reading through it, I realize about a third of my way through the story that there are some major plot holes, holes that size of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. At this point, I’m actually stressing out a bit, because the story is 80,000 words written during NaNoWriMo (so very quickly) and it has some major flaws. It was the perfect test for ChatGPT.

I fed a few lines about the general situation into the chat. Within 30 seconds, I had six potential solutions staring back at me at the screen. Several of them were so elementary I’m embarrassed to even mention them. Yet, several of them were perfect. The best part is, I won’t even need to do any major rewriting to fit it all into the story.

I added a few other lines about other scenarios in the story and the result was the same, but this time for some backstory elements that needed fleshing out.

I will not go into details on this one, but is was a very helpful exercise. 

Rewriting

How about the actual rewrite? Could I use ChatGPT to actually rewrite my text for the above-mentioned story and add more tension, for example? Or more romance? As it turns out, I have a short story I wrote a few years ago I could use for this experiment.

When I wrote this story, I had a word limit I had to work within. This meant that although I could squeeze my entire story in, I wasn’t able to flesh out the emotional aspect as much I would have liked. I wanted more tension to be clear. So, I asked ChatGPT to take a short section of the story I felt lacked some of this and rewrite it, adding more internal tension to the character. To compare, here’s the original section from this story:

“Running late?”

Kate looked up at the approaching waitress, a steaming coffeepot in her hand. Gratefully, she pushed her empty cup towards the edge of the table and nodded.

“He was supposed to be here an hour ago.”

“Didn’t call, did he?”

Kate shook her head. “No, but it could be my phone too. The service has been flaky with this weather.”

“I’m sorry, hon.” The server poured the black coffee. “Let me know if you need anything, ok?”

“Thanks, Myrtle, I appreciate it.”

The server nodded and smiled, then returned to the cafe kitchen. Kate glanced at her phone again. There were no new messages, no phone calls, no voice messages. It was like he had fallen off the face of the earth.

At first, she had been angry. He knew how important this meeting was to her. What if something had happened? Had there been an accident on the way there? She should have insisted on a direct flight instead of the cross-state drive he had insisted on.

When the bottom of the coffee cup made another appearance, she’d had enough. She left a generous tip on the table and headed towards the door.

“Myrtle, would you mind telling Frank I went home if he shows up?”

“Of course, dear, of course. I’ll see you tomorrow morning?”

Kate smiled, nodded, and waved goodbye. She stopped at the front door and zipped up her coat and prepared her umbrella and shivered at the thought of leaving the warm and cozy coffee shop behind. With a deep sigh, she pushed the door open and stepped out into the rain.

Ok, so that’s the original. Here’s what ChatGPT gave me. It’s very similar, but with some added internal tension.

“Running late?”

The waitress approached Kate with a steaming coffeepot in hand, causing her to snap out of her thoughts and look up. She eagerly pushed her empty cup towards the edge of the table and nodded, trying to hide the frustration in her voice.

“He was supposed to be here an hour ago.”

“Didn’t call, did he?” The waitress raised an eyebrow, sensing the tension in Kate’s demeanor. Kate shook her head, the knot in her stomach growing tighter.

“No, but it could be my phone too. The service has been unreliable with this weather.”

“I’m sorry, hon.” The waitress poured the coffee, trying to offer some comfort. “Let me know if you need anything, okay?”

“Thanks, Myrtle, I appreciate it.” Kate managed a smile, but it didn’t reach her eyes. As the waitress returned to the kitchen, Kate couldn’t shake off the feeling of unease. She glanced at her phone again, but there were no new messages, no calls, no voicemails. It was like he had vanished into thin air.

At first, anger had boiled within her. He knew how important this meeting was to her, yet he had failed to show up without a word. But as the minutes ticked by, her anger gave way to worry. What if something had happened to him? An accident on the way there? She should have insisted on a direct flight instead of the cross-state drive he had stubbornly insisted on.

With a heavy heart, Kate drained the last drop of her coffee and left a generous tip on the table. She made her way to the door, her mind racing with fear.

“Myrtle, would you mind telling Frank I went home if he shows up?” Kate called out, her voice cracking.

“Of course, dear, of course.” Myrtle’s kind smile did little to ease Kate’s worries. “I’ll see you tomorrow morning?”

Kate forced a smile, nodded, and stepped out into the rain. As she zipped up her coat and prepared her umbrella, she shivered at the thought of leaving the warm and cozy coffee shop behind. With a deep sigh, she stepped out into the rain, wondering if she would ever see Frank again.

And there you have it. Re-written by ChatGPT with the ask of adding more internal tension. Did the AI succeed? To some extent, yes. No, it’s not written in my style and I would have used different words in several places. The edits also ran afoul of several of ProWritingAid’s checks. But, in general it gave me what I was looking for.

Conclusion

Obviously, there’s a lot more you can do with ChatGPT. This is about the extent I’ve tried using it at this point. I’ve seen examples of how it can improve a wide variety of other aspects of stories, so there’s more to learn.

What I have concluded so far, is this: I’m comfortable using ChatGPT to help me with story outlines, brainstorming for solutions to story issues and such, maybe even rewrites of sections like the above in order to get some inspiration on how to rewrite. But I think in general, you’ll see me doing my own writing. Although it’s convenient to have ChatGPT write it all out, I do want that personal touch on my writing.

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to explore SudoWrite, a service that uses ChatGPT specifically to cater to writers. Through SudoWrite you can do many of the same things you can with ChatGPT directly, but it’s focused on writing, world building, character development and so on. SudoWrite can do the same re-writes as the one I shared above. You can expect to see a more thorough review and my thoughts about this piece of software in a few weeks time.

I’m also going to look at the new and improved Bing, powered by ChatGPT, and see how that’s different from using ChatGPT. That may take a little longer though since I just got access to that yesterday.

Until then, what are your thoughts on ChatGPT and AI as it relates to writing? Do you see it as a threat to your craft, or a helpful assistant that can help you speed up your process and ultimately improve your writing? Oh, and have you tried ChatGPT? What’s your experience? Leave a comment below, share your stories!

Over the last couple of years, I’ve shared my experience using Grammarly with Scrivener on multiple occasions. Although Grammarly has had its own editor, it was never able to load Scrivener projects directly. A workaround for this was the built-in sync function that let a user sync Scrivener writing as text files to an external directory where files could be edited with other text editors on Android or through Dropbox. For mobile devices, Android in particular, the latter still holds true. You can find out how do accomplish that here.

However, the situation regarding Grammarly in Scrivener has changed dramatically since my last blog post about this topic. These days, Grammarly can work in pretty much any application that requires text input, including Scrivener. As Grammarly says on their website, it is now “an all-in one writing assistant that works on your desktop and in your browser. Use it in apps, word processors, email clients, and more.”

What Do You Need?

Go to the Grammarly website (link below) and download the desktop client of your choice. As far as I can tell, this works on both Windows and Mac, although I don’t have a Mac to verify. The client works with the free version of Grammarly as well, so it doesn’t cost you anything to take it for a spin before you splurge on the monthly or annual subscriptions (which are well worth it to me).

Scroll down to the very bottom and select the Grammarly version of your choice. I used the Windows version for this particular post.

Then download the file. You’ll also need to register for an account if you haven’t done so.

Once installed, just run the application. A splash screen of sorts will appear.

From here you can change the settings of Grammarly, such as writing style, language and a few others.

You can also create a new document through the web application by clicking on the New Document button. However, by doing so, you’re moving away from the desktop environment.

At this point, if you open applications that allow you to enter text, such as Scrivener, you will see a little icon in the top right corner of the text entry field that looks like this:

Click on the icon to reveal the Grammarly suggestions, such as those seen below.

You can scroll through the suggestions offered and Accept or Dismiss them as you see fit.

And that, my friends, is Grammarly in Scrivner.

The question is, of course, how well does it work? Since I’ve just started using this version of Grammarly, it’s a bit early for me to say. But, there are some obvious benefits that I see immediately. For example, this version of Grammarly works in other applications as well, so that’s an immediate benefit. As I’m typing this in the WordPress editor in Chrome, the little icon is kindly reminding me I have several suggestions to review. Most likely, it’ll want me to remove the word “obviously” for the sake of clarity, or add a comma after obviously.

Grammarly also works in Joplin, the Evernote replacement I’ve used for the last couple of years. For me, that covers three major applications that I use on a regular basis. So far so good, in other words. Of course, mileage may vary.

For me, this change in how the application can be used cuts out the need for the previous workarounds I’ve detailed here.

If you use both Scrivener and Grammarly, I’d recommend you check it out and support an application that can be immensely helpful in your writing.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve come to realize that in the long run, this method of writing isn’t sustainable nor is it practical. If I ever want to write a longer story, or a series, I need to be able to better plan and tie all the story lines together at the end. Yellow sticky notes just won’t do it.

Plottr is an app that has appeared on my radar several times over the last couple of years. As the name suggests, the primary focus of the app is to help you plot your story, to get it ready for writing.

I’ll emphasize here that Plottr is not a writing app. Sure, you can spend a lot of time writing in Plottr, but what you’re writing is the framework of your story. Plottr is your plotting app, the prep app, the research app. It’s the app you use to sketch out your thoughts, create your intriguing characters and your fantastical worlds.

In this post, I’d like to take a closer look at Plottr and share some of my thoughts on the app.

The Timeline

Let’s start with the Timeline. This is where all the magic happens. It is, to me, the primary interface of Plottr. This is where you build your chapter structure. Your chapters are created using plotlines, which basically are chronological timelines with boxes of information that represent a chapter or other event. The ability to easily view multiple plotlines at a glance is, to me, the beauty of Plottr. I can keep a primary story plotline, for example, that contains the high level details of each chapter. Then, I can also add plotlines for the main character, as well as the supporting characters. In a story I’m working on right now, for example, I’m doing exactly this. It allows me to flesh out the details of a character’s actions in a chapter with multiple scenes while capturing the reactions of the supporting characters in response to what the main character is doing.

In the screenshot below, and the subsequent screenshots, you’ll see how Hamlet is organized using Plottr (other examples can be found here: https://plottr.com/demos/)

Outline Mode

There’s also an Outline mode. It’s a more read-friendly format that stacks all the timeline elements vertically. It’s a convenient way to more easily read a summary of a plotline, for example, since the Timeline only displays a certain amount of data.

Building Your World

There are also sections of Plottr specifically for building your world. The Places section of Plottr is where you can describe the various locations throughout your story. This is all fairly straightforward. Add a name, a brief description and your notes. You can even add an image if you like.

Creating Characters

The Character section is fairly similar. You enter the name of your character, whether it’s a main character, supporting or other. Then, you add a short one-sentence description and an image of your character (if you have one). However, this is where the Character section diverges from the format of the Places. The Character section also provides the means to add character attributes that you define. It could be literally anything, from race to religion to social status and so on. The attributes can then be populated for each character. You can also save a set of attributes as a template for later reuse.

Should you draw a blank on the attributes, you can apply one of the existing templates. These range from personality traits to character arc to goal, motivation and conflict, etc. In other words, there are plenty of options for you to create your character.

And There’s More

There is also a general Notes section where you can add information about whatever you want, but still associate that note with other information in your story, whether that’s a character or location.

Plottr also has a tag system of sorts, which kind of reminds me of the hashtag system used by Twitter and other social media sites. You can tag characters, locations and so on with a particular tag, which then makes it easier to search and find all related notes in Plottr.

If you feel that creating your own outline is just too much work, Plottr has an extensive library of story templates which you can apply and instantly create a story structure for you to follow. There’s the three act structure, templates related to romance and even a children’s books template.

Let’s not forget the mobile app that is also available. It makes the process of working on your stories on the go so much easier and it’s getting better and better (I’m using the Android version). However, I still experience the occasional crash with the Android version, so if you’re planning on using it, I would encourage you to save often, just to ensure you don’t lose data.

Finally, let me touch on Plottr’s support for other applications. Plottr supports exporting your project to MS Word and Scrivener. As a Scrivener user, this is a fantastic option to have, as it’s easy to complete your planning on Plottr and then just export it to Scrivener. There is also, apparently, an import function to load Scrivener projects into Plottr. That one I haven’t tried yet, so I can’t speak to how well that works, but I could see that being a useful option as well.

There is, of course, more to Plotter than just what I’ve described above. Plottr Pro, for example, provides a web interface and sync across platforms. There is also an option to plan for multiple stories in a series, there is Linux support and so on. It’s an application that is constantly improving. It’s also an app that’s relatively cheap to try, starting out at $25 for a year. That’s what I did initially just to try it out. A plus here is that you can keep using the app after the year is up, you just don’t get any additional updates until you resume your subscription. In fact, I did this for a bit when my focus was more on writing than plotting. So, it gives you some flexibility until I was ready to resume my subscription.

Final Thoughts

For me, Plottr has provided me a way to actually continue my pantsing but in a bit more of an organized fashion. Plottr provides the space I need to do exploratory writing and map my story as I go along. If I find myself at a fork in a story, I can try one path and see where it goes. If I don’t like it, I can go down another plotline and see if I like it better. Then, when I’m done, I already have my story structure in place and I can easily import it into Scrivener for the actual heavy lifting. Simply said, Plottr has become a staple in my library of writing software and it’s well the minimal yearly cost.

Still have your doubts? You can try Plottr risk-free for 30 days (14-day trial and a 30-day refund policy). Follow the link below and try it out today.

Yes, 50,000 words can seem daunting, and depending on where you live, local holidays may play a role in your ability to write. Thanksgiving in the USA, for example, is a big family holiday that can easily distract from your writing. If you don’t plan accordingly, it’s easy to let your guard down and miss out on writing that you need to get to your target. But it can be done. I’ve done it several times myself.

A few years ago I created the Online Writing Log for the specific purpose of avoiding those pitfalls, and to be able to track your projects and progress throughout the year. However, I know that some prefer to track their writing in a spreadsheet so I created the Writing Log 3 for that purpose earlier this year.

The Writing Log 3 has some of the same features as the Online Writing Log. You can define your projects, set monthly goals, track your writing sessions and always know exactly how much you have left to write to reach your target. Best of all, you can do this for any month of the year.

In this post, I’d like to briefly explain how the Writing Log 3 can be used for NaNoWriMo.

Define Your Project

Just like you would setup and define your project on the NaNoWriMo website, you add your project to the Writing Log 3 Project page. You set the type of project it is, a word count target and start and stop dates.

Set Your Monthly Target

Then it’s time to set your monthly target on the Monthly Goals sheet.. Since we’re dealing with NaNoWriMo and November in this case, you enter the first day of the month in the Month column, then 50,000 words as the goal. You will now see the 1,667 daily word target you need to reach.

But what if you can’t write on Thanksgiving or the day after? What if you have family around and it would be rude to sneak away for a couple of hours to write?

That’s what the Days to Skip section is for. Put an X in the day you think you’ll need to skip and the daily goal amount will automatically adjust and spread out the word count target for those particular days across the rest of the month. It increases the daily goal across the board a bit to make it more manageable to make up for those days you may not be able to write.

Track Your Writing

Once your project and goal has been setup, it’s time to start tracking your writing. The Writing Log 3 allows you to track multiple writing sessions per day. Especially for those that are busy, you can write a little bit here and there as there is time. You may not even need to take Thanksgiving off, but squeeze in 15 minutes here, 15 minutes there. It all adds up. I usually write in 30 minute increments myself outside of NaNoWriMo. One session in the morning, one at night. That adds up to an hour. If you can squeeze in writing during your lunch hour as well, then reaching your daily target shouldn’t be a problem. You can record all of these sessions with The Writing Log 3 and see exactly how much you have left to cover for the day.

Review Your Progress

Finally, the Dashboard gives you a great overview of how you’re doing. You can see how much you have left to do in the current month, the daily progress can be reviewed and you’ll see what days you’re writing the most on (this is another factor you can look at to plan ahead for future writing sessions).

You can, of course, also review annual progress by month. The Writing Log 3 is, after all, not just for the month of November. It can be used throughout the year.

If you’d like to find out more about how it works in practice, check out the YouTube video I made specifically for The Writing Log 3 below.

The Writing Log 3 is available for Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel for $9.99 at my Etsy shop. For the month of November, use the discount code NANO2022 for 20% off the purchase price.

If you end up using The Writing Log 3, I’d love to hear what you think about it. Leave a comment below or at either of the above sites.

Finally, remember to register your NaNoWriMo project on the official website, https://www.nanowrimo.org. Even if you end up using the Writing Log 3, you still need to log your entries on the official site to take advantage of the offers they have and features they offer.

I wish you the best of luck in November!

Humble Bundle is a favorite of mine. Not only do they package great software at a great price, but they also donate part of the proceeds to charity. Part of this also allows you to decide how much money of the bundle price goes to charity, how much goes to the creators and how much goes to Humble Bundle itself.

Just in time for NaNoWriMo, Humble Bundle is offering the NaNoWriMo Writing Bundle. It features a variety of writing prompt books but also a selection of books about outlining, character arcs, structuring your novel and so on by K. M. Weiland. For $18, you’ll get access to a nice resource valued at $184 that can help you grow as a writer. Here’s a list of what you get for $18.

• Do It For Yourself
• Writing Action (Lit Starts): A Book of Writing Prompts
• Stay Inspired: Finding Motivation for Your Creative Work
• Writing Humor
• Writing Dialogue
• Writing Memoir
• Structuring Your Novel
• Outlining Your Novel Workbook
• Truth About Writing
• Writing Your Story’s Theme
• Outlining Your Novel
• Creating Character Arcs
• Writing Character
• Writing Sci-Fi and Fantasy (Lit Starts): A Book of Writing Prompts

As it turns out, the charity of choice for this bundle is NaNoWriMo itself. This means that by buying these books, not only do you benefit, but NaNoWriMo as a whole does. It’s a great way to support NaNoWriMo if you are a frequent participant like I am.

Click the button below and check out the selection of books available. I already have them all downloaded on my phone.

However, if you’re a regular visitor to this site, you know that my preferred platform is Linux. As you can imagine, it wasn’t long before I started looking at how I could run Plottr on my Linux distro together with Scrivener.

About six months or so ago, as I was researching how to best run Plottr on Wine, I came across this help article on the Plottr website, aptly titled Can I Install Plotter on Linux?

As it turns out, Plottr is available as a deb package and an AppImage. If you use any Debian-based distribution, such as Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, Pop!_OS and even Elementary OS. If you have a Chromebook, you’ll be able to use the deb package on there as well (assuming you’ve installed the Linux subsystem).

So how do I go about installing Plottr? While I normally would write a whole long tutorial on how to do this, the help article I listed above takes you through all the essentials. If you’re a Linux user already, the steps outlined should be straightforward.

But wait!

One thing you need to be aware of is that Plottr is not a free application. Often, you can get a free two-week trial to try it out just by visiting the Plottr website, but beyond that you’ll need to purchase a license to continue to use it.

Pricing starts at $25 for a year for one device (which isn’t bad at all), but you can also buy a lifetime license.

If you’re a Linux user, I’d love to hear how your experience was, what distro you used it on and so on.

NovProg is one of those apps.

NovProg is a simple app. Create your novel, set your date range and your goal. Then, every day as you write, you record your daily progress. It’s one update per day. That’s it.

Of course, there’s a bit more to it than that.

First, you need to create your novel project. A novel in NovProg contains a few data points related to the project that you are working on. This includes the name, your word count goal and how much you expect to write every day.

You also define the date range for your writing period. This is actually one of my favorite aspects of NovProg, because you’re not limited to a calendar month. You can pick any period you want. It would be a week, two weeks, six weeks or six months.

Once you have created your novel, you’ll be presented with the novel progress screen, as seen below. It shows the date range and the target you need to hit on a daily basis to get to your goal.

Then it’s just a matter of entering your daily word count by clicking on the pencil button at the bottom of the screen. A popup will appear that allows you to enter your word count.

An important note about the daily words: as of this writing, there does not appear to be a way to enter word counts for any day but today. So, if you forgot to enter your word count yesterday, you can’t go back. You have to include it in today’s word count. That’s not a huge issue in itself since it doesn’t impact your progress towards your goal, but it will impact the accuracy of the charting in the app.

The Daily view in the app shows word counts by day and how close you are to your daily goal. In the below screenshot, you can see that the 1,500 words I entered above only reaches partway to the daily goal of 1,667 words (indicated by the blue horizontal line). That’s 89% of my goal for the day.

And that’s about all there’s to NovProg. It’s a simple app that’s perfect for events like NaNoWriMo, but also your own word count tracking.

NovProg is available for both Linux and Windows. To download, click the link below.

By now, those of you trying to find a way to edit your Scrivener projects on the go with your Android device has likely seen some of my posts on the topic (most recently here, but also here). As those posts detail, there are several apps that lets you tap into the files created by the Scrivener sync function.

The common aspect of these prior posts have been these additional apps: write with Scrivener, sync between devices with Dropbox and edit with your favorite writing app.

Well, you don’t need to do that anymore.

No, Scrivener still doesn’t support Android with a native app. However, I happened to stumble upon a feature in Dropbox that makes additional writing apps unnecessary: a built-in text editor.

Yes, the Android Dropbox app does, in fact, have a built-in text editor. I stumbled upon this completely by accident over the holidays and you can imagine my excitement when I realized what this meant for my writing on the go.

Naturally. I had to share my discovery.

What you need

To edit Scrivener files on Android through Dropbox, you’ll just need a couple of applications: Scrivener and Dropbox (surprise!).

Scrivener

First things first. If you don’t have Scrivener, go to the website right now and check it out. They usually have a 30-day free trial which lets you check out the application if you’re not familiar with it already.

A Dropbox Account

If you don’t have a Dropbox account, you can use my referral link to sign up for a free, personal one. Follow all the necessary steps to set up your local sync folder on your computer as described in the installation process before you proceed.

Once you’ve signed up for Dropbox, don’t forget to download the Android app to your device.

The Next Steps

Once you have installed Scrivener and Android, you’re ready to get to work.

The first step, of course, is to write your story. For the sake of this post, let’s imagine you’re writing a story about Arthur Redfinger and The Green Alien (what actually happens to Arthur is, of course, of no consequence for the purposes of this post). Below, Arthur has just landed on an alien planet. The first steps of Arthur Redfinger’s adventures! And yes, it’s the same story I’ve used in all other iterations of this post about using Dropbox to help you edit Scrivener files on your Android device.

To be able to edit Arthur’s adventures on your Android device, you first have to sync the contents of your story with an “External Folder”. You can see the menu option below.

Note: “Sync with mobile devices” is not an option you want to use unless you have the iOS version of Scrivener, in which case there is little point in reading any further. None of the below stuff is likely to be relevant.

Before your first sync will happen, you will need to configure a few things, such as where the files will be saved, what format and so on. So, after selecting Sync > with External Folder as shown above, the following screen will appear:

At the top, you select the path of sync folder. It is important that this folder is within your Dropbox sync folder for the files to be available on your Android device.

Also, change the Format for external Draft files option from RTF to plain text. All other options can be left alone. Then click Save.

Next, you’re actually going to sync your files with your Dropbox folder. Simply select Sync > with External Folder Now and you’ll be all set.

Now, you’re ready to shut that computer down, grab those car keys and find the closest coffee shop, Android device and Bluetooth keyboard in hand (the keyboard is unnecessary, but it makes typing much easier and much faster).

Order your coffee, tea or whatever your favorite brew is, find a table in a corner, and setup your keyboard and device.

First, open the Dropbox app and find the draft folder in the directory specified in Scrivener. It should look something like this:

Click on the file you want to edit. At this point, you’ll likely get a pop-up that asks what application you want to use to edit the file. Select the Dropbox Text Editor.

Edit the file as needed. In this case, I just added one more sentence that reads “added on Dropbox” as a simple proof of functionality.

Click the back arrow at the top left of the screen and save the changes when prompted.

While you’re at it, go ahead and create a new file called Test Scene.

Add some random words, then save as you did above. You’ve successfully edited your Scrivener project on the go!

Well, would you look at the time? It’s time to head home. Collect your things, throw away the garbage and hit the road. Once you get home, turn on your computer and open up your story in Scrivener.

Note: before you do anything else, give your computer a few minutes to sync all changed Dropbox files. Usually, this happens instantly, but just in case. In fact, you can verify that the files have synced to your Dropbox folder and that you see the same ones on your computer as in your phone.

When you have verified that the Dropbox sync is complete, click Sync > with External Folder Now in Scrivener.

Once the operation has completed, you should see something like the below screenshot.

You should also see the fantastic new scene you added while at the coffee shop.

If you click back to your regular Scrivener Binder, you should also see your new scene added to the list of others in the folder structure. In the case of the below screenshot, the Test Scene is right below Touchdown.

There you have it. You have written a story in Scrivener, used Dropbox to sync and edit with Android, then synced the updated files back to Scrivener.

Conclusion

If you’ve followed my posts on this topic, you can clearly see a trend. Although Scrivener doesn’t have a native Android app, the Folder Sync feature allows an Android user to use Dropbox or potentially other cloud services to edit files while on the go. With Dropbox, it’s literally built into the app and allows you to work on your projects anywhere. At the same time, you’ll be almost instantly up to date when you return to your computer.

What do you think? Is this a solution you would use for writing or editing on the go? I’d love to hear your about your experience. Drop a note below!