There’s a new website that’s making the rounds today: I Write Like.

Just paste a selection of your writing in the box, hit the button and the program does a statistical analysis on your writing.

Sure, it’s only as good as the algorithm. And sure, it’s probably on a par with palm reading or numerology. But Still, I don’t know what to make of the results on my first chapter:

Seriously? I Write like Dan Brown?

Working My Novel Day Something or Other ©, .

So twenty minutes later, I had this Quick and Dirty Novel Tracking Chart Done.

Basically, I wanted to do a Novel-in-a-Month program, and use one of the trackers that are available as motivational tools.Ā Nothing seemed to do what I wanted it to do: They’ve all got that 50K Words in 30 Days aspect that NaNoWriMo made so popular.Ā Which I never understood: 50K isn’t really novel length and divided over 30 days comes to 1,666 words a day, not a nice round number. So I tried to do some things a little differently.

First, I got rid of the 30 days. A month is nice, but that means I’m starting on a Tuesday and ending on a Thursday. Huh?Ā Let’s go with even 7 day weeks. 5 weeks is 35 days. (Or seven work weeks of 5 days. Whatever. Go for it.) Then, if we round the words per day up to 2,000 we get 70,000 words on the chart. Still doable, a lot easier to plan, closer to novel length. I Like it.

My Screen Capture-Fu is Weak. Right Click to Save

In order to fit it on the page, I used five cells across, which led to some creative organizing. Work this chart from the bottom up toward your goal.Feel free to put gold stickers anywhere you want.

Finally, Feel Free to Distribute and Improve on this. It’s under an Attribution, Share-Alike license. It was just a quick and Dirty Chart to get me started and I’m happy to share.

Right Click and Save As: here for the ODT

And Here’s the PDF. Right Click and save.

Novel Tracking Chart ©, .

Table of contents for Themes

1. 20 Free WordPress Themes for Writers
2. 16 More Free WordPress Themes for Writers

Isn’t it time you started a Blog?

Having a professional, well maintained blog is becoming essential to your writing career. Promote your writing, develop a community of fans,Ā create a strong presence: all possible with a well designed, popular blog.

So here are 20 Free WordPress templates designed to help you project a professional, polished image. As always I have tried to link directly to the designer’s site, but have quite a few going to the WordPress Theme Viewer. I have tried to stay away from LinkWare: you’re trying to promote yourself, not someone else.

20. Typewriter-Let’s start with the obvious- Typewriter is a clean, well laid out design with an image of a classic, retro typewriter in the header. Basic Blog Theme without a lot of features.

19. Tropical Grunge-

Tropical Grunge WordPress theme

A Dark Green Background with a light text area, Tropical Grunge has a cool header image and would work well on Fantasy writers‘ blogs.

18. Abstractia- Another Dark Green Theme, with a little more professional look.

Abstractica WordPress Theme

17. Zeke 1.0- A popular Theme. Dark Red header and yellow text, with a woody background. Well laid out for monetization and sales.

Zeke WordPress Theme

16. RetroBook-An antique book. Small area for text, lots of wasted space. If you want to put up a bio and biblio, but don’t want to actually blog, this might be the way to go.

retrobook WordPress Theme

15. Nebula- A great Sci-Fi Theme. Dark Text on a static image of the Horsehead Nebula.

14. PDawn- dark theme, with a depressing/ Horror image. Very understated and elegant. Would Work for most horror, except Extreme.

PDawn Theme

13. Point Blank- Speaking of extreme Horror…Milo is a prolific designer of awesome looking themes. He’s all over the WordPress Theme Viewer. Unfortunately, a lot of his themes can be considered experimental- Cool looking and State-Of-The-Art, but hard to use and modify. Point Blank isn’t one of these. It works, and works well.

Point Blank Horror WordPress Theme

12.Nebula 1.8- Another Dark Sci-Fi Theme. More of a dark Tech / Cyber feel.

11.WP-Premium- A professional Theme with three different color schemes. What I’m using here (Red Theme). Not real personal, but easy to work with.

10. Options Theme- Unusual Theme with lots of “Options” Can be used for a blog or a Magazine Style Theme. Two Color Styles- “Light, which was this site’s previous theme and is more personal, and “Dark”, Which I use on Battlestar Grammactica. Theme options are controlled not by editing the files, but through a Dashboard Applet.

9- Visionary- Another Theme by the same designer as Options. This is a News style theme, but is not as cluttered and should work well for a personal writer’s site. No Picture since it’s a clean grid / Magazine style theme.

8,7,6,5,4. Notebook, Duffy, Blue Jeans, Aspire and Genesis- All these themes are pretty impressive, and pretty nice looking. Aspire was used on My daughter’s site, and was the inspiration for this list. When looking for the original designer, I came across InfoCreek’s website and all these Themes. They all seem based on the same structure.

Duffy Theme

Duffy and Aspire are Antique themes, Notebook has a Feminine touch, Blue Jeans is Rustic and Genesis is High Tech.

3. Halloween-Good Dark Template. Actually not so much Horror as Grungy Industrial. Extra Points Because the Designer uses it for his own Site.

Horror WordPress Theme

2.DFire-A dark Theme with Light Sidebars and an Unusual color scheme. Nice images throughout.

DFire Theme

1.Sandbox- C’mon, You’re Creative, right? Why Not Make your own theme to reflect your true personality? Sandbox is a theme designed to allow easy customization and configuration. A lot of the Free themes I’ve found use this as their starting point.

Want more?Ā I’ve found 16 MoreĀ Free Themes- More Modern, More Interactive, More Professional!

20 Free WordPress Themes for Writers ©, .

Over the past couple of years, OpenOffice seems to have gone from “That Free Office Clone For People Who Can’t Afford MS Office to “Why Pay For Office when I have OpenOffice?”

There’s a couple of good reasons for this beyond the price. OpenOffice is multi-platform. You can run it on Windows, Mac, Linux and Solaris. It runs off a pen drive if needed. It has features missing from Office like the ability to export in PDF. Users have an often bewildering ability to control the look and feel of OpenOffice (Yet Theming still sucks).

And it has extensions. Lots and lots of extensions that add functionality and customize OPenOffice to help you produce more.

Here’s a few of the extensions I have installed at the moment:

For Writer:

Writer’s Tools- One of the best all around Extensions- Everyone should have this installed.Ā Offers several tools that should be included in Open Office anyway- Backup files to FTP or Amazon, thesaurus, visual word count, easy notes and tasks and more. It’s a little tricky to install- Make sure you understand how to link the databaseĀ to get all the features. But a definite must have

Writer’s extras- A few other features that didn’t make the cut, but worth a download. Adds a menuĀ on Writer for Microblogging, Transliterate and easy Markups.

Openoffice.org2GoogleDocs- import and export files to Google Docs and Zoho. Writer’s tools has similar features, but this gets added to the Quickstart Menu.

Alternative Dialog Find and Replace- Provides a full featured and more useful find and replace than the standard

Professional Templates II-A collection of 120 templates. Posters, Projects, Letters and more.

Book Template- Stephen has developed a great template for writers. Under construction, but regularly updated and has a good community being built around it. Allows you to enter text in a variety of styles for CharacterĀ and plot notes, summaries, random noise, etc., then hide these styles when printing out a final copy. Pretty neat.

ccooo- Puts a Creative Commons license on your work.

Language Tool- Simple Grammar Checker.

For PDF:

Sun PDF Importer- Writer will export to PDF, but doesn’t really edit in PDF Format. Infact, there’s no real free PDF Editor that works well, but this does a decent job. Read the home page for information on how to use it and its limitations.

If there are any other extensions out there you like using, let me know.

OpenOffice Extensions, Add-ons and Templates for Writers ©, .

The Folks at TuneCore have released a beta site for their new e-publishing site, Bibliocore, and it looks like a winner. Basically, pay a one time fee to post your book in ePub Format, and Bibliocore will forward it to iBookstore, where the 300,000 early adopters of Apple‘s iPad are dying to find content for their awesome new devices. You get to set your price and keep all the profit.

Sound too good to be true?

Well, TuneCore is the largest distributor and has one of the highest revenue-generating music catalogs in the world: In 2009 alone, more then one song per second sold by a TuneCore artist on iTunes. TuneCore is a low, flat fee service that distributes music to iTunes, eMusic, Rhapsody and many other major download and streaming sites while taking no rights and no revenue from the sale of the music. Artists are building careers, selling significant volumes of music and generating revenue through TuneCore. Since its launch in 2006, TuneCore has distributed tens of thousands of albums and millions of songs to iTunes and other digital stores by Grammy winners and unsigned artists alike. TuneCore artists include Drake, Beck, Jay-Z, Aretha Franklin, Keith Richards, Public Enemy, Nine Inch Nails, Ricky Skaggs, Paul Westerberg, MGM Studios, Warren G, Bjork, Moby, High School Musical cast members, Ali Lohan, Cirque Du Soleil, Starbucks and tens of thousands more.

Check out the Bibliocore Beta publishing platform here.

Bibliocore: Publish your E-Book on iPad, Give the E-Profit to iSelf ©, .