Darswords

At midnight I got into the Night of Writing Dangerously. That moment when Halloween is over, All Saints Day began and NaNoWriMo rings the bell to start. Well, I don’t know about the bell. It must be in my head. There are tons of writing groups that get together and type for a couple hours. I have done that a couple times. But usually, I just pretend I am with a group and get it going on my own. I will watch this when I finish here as I didn’t watch it last night. I just wanted to share the excitement and fun.

My theory is that if I can start large I will be slightly ahead when the mid-month slumps or people-time interruptions occur. But I managed 2,329 words last night. And like I said I will be doing more when blogging is completed.

As I have said I am continuing the novel I started way back in March (I think-2020 is hard to keep track of it after months of editing and rearranging bits and pieces, taking out all journaling, complaints, and prompts that didn’t work for the story I ended up–yesterday, at 25,172. So my goal is to add 50,000 to that this month. I know I said this in part last night but I felt I needed to waste some time spelling things out better.

So for the months between the writing of the beginning and now, I have been using three different programs, each featuring something unique to help the writing, editing process. yWriter is my favorite. I can outline on the fly, keep my characters, locations, and items up-to-date, etc. The biggest downfall, for me, has been that it wants to save locally. I learned long ago that computers break down and then where will your documents be? I tried saving to dongles, but that had its own problems. Finally, I started to export the project and save it in my cloud drive. But once you have a new machine you have to reset-up how you had it before the breakdown. That happened in September. My laptop nosedived and my husband loaned me his to try and keep up my writing. Good thing I had that export to rebuild from. Then my husband turned me on to yWriter7. Now we can save everything to Dropbox. I was new to it so Hubby had to teach me how that works. And it does! And I can open the project on my Fire or tablet or even my phone if I get the inspiration. Here’s a YouTube of how it works:

The second favorite that I use a lot at the beginning of a story and then just try to copy and paste to keep it updated is WriteItNow  It is great for setting up characters. You can do a random search of names or add ones you have already created. Then you can find personality traits, set up who is related to whom and how. I like the colors I can make the background and fonts. Anyway, here is a YouTube on this amazing program:

The last step for me is opening one of the latest exports from yWriter in good ole Microsoft Word, where I open Grammarly and do the editing. I don’t think I need an URL or YouTube on Word. But as I was writing this I saw a bunch of tutorials that I may want to stroll through and learn other ways to use what I have.

By the way, I have Scrivener but somehow in moving computers I can’t seem to figure out how to get it up and running again. I did find it had its uses but I often found it confusing. To each their own, I suppose.

Okay, I’ve procrastinated writing long enough. Hope you found something here that is useful for you.