Drawing from the Well
Queries Sent: 0
Total Queries: 19
Rejections: 3
Scenes Mapped: 8
Total Scenes: 269
Another good writing day yesterday. I didn’t get as many down as I did the day before because I had to think through some of how everything was going to work. I did, however, come up with a GREAT idea toward the end of the series. Drive time = think time.
Now, I do need to get back to sending queries…
Filling the Well
1984: 59%
Bloodwitch: 5%
I got A LITTLE reading done yesterday in Bloodwitch. Here’s hoping I can catch up on my YouTube playlist today and get back to listening to 1984. Gotta keep reading. I’m falling behind!
Polishing the Well
Last night my wife and I saw Anastasia. It was great. The lead had an incredible, powerful voice. The costuming was fantastic. The set was really innovative and immersive despite its technological edge. The music was great as always. We had a wonderful time and we’re both worn out now.
Well Chat
New Kit on the Block
To cap off my Tools of the Trade blog series, let’s look at a newer tool on the market. At least, it’s newer to me. Smart Edit was originally intended to be used as an editing add-in to MS Word (and that’s still available). The developer has taken it further, though, and created SmartEdit Writer, a separate, standalone application designed for writers to build their entire manuscript.
There are some parallels here with yWriter in that you can create scenes and notes, but these are truly just document fragments that are later stitched together to form your manuscript. In this vein, yWriter has more functionality.
SmartEdit has its strengths, though. First off, there are a lot of utilities:
These first two toolbars are nothing special. Add scenes and fragments (not sure what those are) as well as notes to go along with your scenes. You can also conduct research and store that separately. Everything is arranged in a tree format seen below:
Scenes and Notes are automatically nested into the currently selected item, but they can be easily moved with drag and drop. SmartEdit even shows a bright green arrow to indicate where the selected piece of text will get dropped. After that, you can go into each scene and write just like you would in MS Word. The basic formatting options are available.
Then there’s your Actions & Tools. In the image, I cut off the Project Manager which is your main window to change between various projects (read: books). The Word Count acts as you see above though there are some drop-down options too. You can make a back up and import/export. The Search for Character Names function is a little odd to me, but I’m sure it has some functionality; I just haven’t spent enough time in the app to figure it out.
Lastly, we come to the Editor toolbar and this is clearly what this program was built on. There are a lot of options here, but it all boils down to letting SmartEdit run its analytical tools on your scene/fragment/manuscript to check for issues. I snagged an image of the utility list below:
As you can see, there are A LOT of reports that you can parse through to look for problems. It’s kind of daunting, but if you go through all this and feel confident in what you’ve written, then you’re probably beyond line editing. And that’s a good thing. K.M. Weiland had a short video/podcast about this program when it launched back in 2013. You can find it on her website here. It goes into a lot of the plusses of SmartEdit Editor plug in within Word. Those same utilities are available here. And you can upload your manuscript directly. Am I making myself clear?
In short, use SmartEdit for your editing needs to get a good sense of any problems with your grammar, word use, and sentence length. Pair that with ProWritingAid’s free utilities and you should have a polished manuscript by the end of it.
And that is the end of the Tools of the Trade series. Thank you for going on this explorative ride with me. I hope you’ve learned as much as I have and found some new tool to use on your writing journey. If you have, let me know in the comments. I’m excited to hear about writing journeys.
Tomorrow, we’ll get back to the topical posts where we revisit the correlation between time poverty and happiness.
May the tide carry you to safer shores.
BSG