Friday, October 31, 2014

Neil Gaiman's Story Ideas from Twitter

I was listening to Selected Shorts this week and it was hosted by Neil Gaiman. He read two of his own stories, finishing with “July Tale,” in which a lovesick husband builds an igloo out of books. What was interesting was that Gaiman explained that the inspiration for July Tale came from a recent Twitter campaign where readers could share ideas for stories that he would write. The stories can be downloaded in PDF format at Blackberry.

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

3 Cool Online Novel Writing Tools in Time for NaNo

Novel Writing Month is just around the corner and I've been checking out some software and sites to help keep this year's efforts on track. Here are three online novel writing sites that you can use to keep writing anywhere.

HiveWord
They  call it an online fiction organizer, which is really a web-based story organizer that is easy to use. It provides quick and easy outlining of scenes, characters, settings and plotlines, and generates terrific compilation lists of the same. In addition, Hiveword stores your work online for you in a private account.

In the creator of Hiveword own words, he says "Hiveword tracks scenes, characters, settings, plot lines, POV, etc., in a simple-to-use interface. Hiveword is purposefully built just for novel organization so it already speaks your language and is optimized for the task. Unlike a spreadsheet, for example, it makes sorting and filtering scenes super easy."
Link: https://hiveword.com/

LitLift
LitLift is free. It was created with NaNo in mind. It is a place to keep track of everything about your novel, from character descriptions to settings, to chapters and scenes in the sequence they ought to happen.

The creators describe LitLift as a way "to help the world expand free thought, and in particular, share those thoughts, stories, writings, musings, etc. in a simply, easy-to-use, FREE application to 1) help develop and organize your writings, 2) collaborate and enhance your writing skills and 3) share your writing with others. Please note our application is most thoroughly tested using Chrome and IE, so for now we generally recommend using one of those browsers."
Link: http://www.litlift.com/

NowNovel
Now Novel provides a process that gives you a blueprint for writing your novel. It's can help get you  to be a novelist. Its personable, hands-on and step-by-step approach as well as its integrated social structure serve to separate it from the crowd, but not necessarily a better option.

Now Novel explains how it works: "The first three sections of Now Novel are entirely free: you can create your mood, find your central idea and test that it is definitely the right one. Once you pay a monthly subscription fee, you get access to the entire process, which includes finding your story type, plot, setting and character details (all very in-depth) as well as a guided process (called the Skeleton) for actually writing your novel once you have all the ingredients."
Link: http://www.nownovel.com/