Drawing from the Well
Queries Sent: 0
Total Queries: 18
Rejections: 2
Scenes Mapped: 1
Total Scenes: 252
I mapped a scene! Yay! Yesterday wasn’t a total loss on that front. However, I did add in the new locations for the Fifth Eighth into yWriter. I’m now up to 38 locations for Book Two. It’s kind of crazy the amount of globetrotting going on here. That’s what happens when the storyline splinters.
Filling the Well
1984: 59%
Bloodwitch: 4%
Yeah, no progress here, but I did read about a page of the Ron Chernow biography of Hamilton. I deserve an oatmeal cream pie for that. It’s interesting, but the number of words per page is daunting, never mind the fact that it’s over 800 pages long. I said to my wife yesterday that would be the book I die reading. She was not amused.
Polishing the Well
Yesterday, despite being Revenge of the Fifth, was pretty tame. I helped a friend in the morning which precluded us from going to church. Then I wrote the blog and my ONE scene. After that, we went and grabbed some sample paint color swatches since we’re painting our dining room and then had a steak dinner. It was a lovely Sunday.
Well Chat
A Myriad of Digital Tools
We’re nearing the end of our blog series about various writing tools. Today, we turn to the internet. There are countless tools out there for use in drafting and editing, but I’m going to focus on three today: ProWritingAid, Campfire, and WordPress.
ProWritingAid is a website where writers can actively write and edit their manuscripts live. The advantage of PWA is that it has a plethora of tools at its disposal to help you clean up your mess-uscript. You can review overused words, detect cliches, verify internal consistency, ensure varied sentence length and structure, and many more. Their grammar checker is even stronger than MS Word’s.
The nice thing about PWA is that the base version is free! Now, that comes with some limitations such as word count, but there is a Premium version that unlocks that limit as well as gives you access to a desktop app that plugs into Word and other word processing applications. Plus, they give you access to their library of writing books. The Premium PWA isn’t cheap ($60 for 1 year up to $210 for a lifetime license), but it could be a good investment.
Campfire is a whole other ball of wax from PWA. Campfire operates by giving you tools for building your story rather than editing it. It works as a repository for all the information about your book. Characters, locations, timelines, you name it and Campfire probably has a utility for it. It includes a suite for plot development and even has an encyclopedia section where you can put ANYTHING about your book to store as knowledge for later. Campfire is designed for fantasy stories and tabletop RPG development (which really are not that different) but you could use it for other genres as well. The nice thing about Campfire is that it is much less expensive than PWA Premium. They offer a 10-day fully unlocked trial after which point you can pay a one-time $25 license fee for a limited version or $50 for the fully unlocked version you used in the trial (also a lifetime license). I haven’t purchased this myself yet, but I’m considering it.
If you’re here reading this, you already know a little bit about WordPress. It serves many functions, all of which are designed to be public. It is first and foremost a blogging website (you know, like how I’m using it now) but it can be more. You can build out various pages and make it into a full-fledged website. This is a great idea for authors as it starts out FREE and can remain that way for as long as you like. Beyond that, however, they allow you to upgrade where you get your own domain and some advanced tools and customization for your site. There are successful businesses, including agency firms, that use WordPress as their website engine. The pricing tiers are varied in price and feature set, but there’s something for everyone. The only downside is that there is no lifetime license like you can buy for PWA or Campfire. Again, I haven’t purchased this yet, but it is top of the list.
So there are some examples of online tools. As you can see just from these few options, there’s A LOT out there. Hop out there and do some research. Tomorrow, we’re going to dive into the strongest, most used tool in my arsenal at the moment: yWriter!
May the tide carry you to safer shores.
BSG