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. 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. 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? 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 ©, .

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. 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 database 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 menu 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 Character 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 ©, .

Writing The Novel ©, .

My Story Writer writing software brings technology to the creative writing process so that you now have a structure for organizing all of your writing projects. You bring the ideas or use the brainstorming functionality to create some and My Story Writer delivers a way to control the writing process the way you want to from conceptualization of your story idea to the day when you submit your manuscript for publication.

With your all of your ideas about characters, plot, setting and story details centralized and organized, you can stay focused on the most important task at hand: writing your novel.

(more…)

My Writing Software ©, .

Writing anything complex (a book, research paper, newspaper or magazine article, technical writing, script, etc.) can be a daunting prospect. Wouldn`t it be great to have a tool that broke your writing task down into manageable pieces? What if this software actually put the fun back in writing?. . . . .
Writer`s Blocks is a unique software package that makes organizing information and ideas for any complex writing assignment easy and fun! You create movable blocks of text that you can drag and drop into a coherent structure. Transfer your outline into the integrated full-featured word processor and elaborate on your ideas. Each block remains linked to a section of your manuscript for quick and easy reference. Click on a block to automatically scroll the corresponding section of your manuscript into view.
. . . . .
Professional and aspiring writers alike find that Writer`s Blocks unique visual presentation frees them up from the mechanics of writing and lets them conc (more…)

Writer’s Blocks 3 ©, .