Liquid Story Binder
Ironically, I've been using the trial version of it and wondering if it'll keep going after a month... XD Guess I won't be wondering anymore? Since it's today's Giveaway of the Day here.
So queenitsy made a post about Scrivener and how awesome it is awhile ago, but unfortunately, it's only for Macs. On a whim, I did some Googling for a good Windows alternative and found the same thing everywhere: nothing's as good as Scrivener, but there here are a few. Try them out, see what works, blah blah blah.
I think I did about four, including PageFour, Celtx, Liquid Story Binder, and something else that I uninstalled again after like two minutes because it was so unintuitive, I couldn't even figure out where to start typing. PageFour was a little too simple for me, but it has tabs and a word frequency counter. Celtx is much better for film scripts and possibly screeplays, but for regular writing, it's kind of useless and also a hassle. Out of these, LSB clearly came out on top. It does take some getting used to, but right off the bat, I was impressed by all the things they'd considered. When you create a project, it lets you include things like playlists and galleries of stuff that inspires the story. It also has quite a few mechanisms for setting up and viewing stuff horizontally, which I find helpful? I feel like the vertical set-up of Word makes it hard for me to be consistent sometimes because I'm always just looking at what's on the screen, which means I write from scene to scene. As a result, the tone and general direction of my writing changes a lot, especially since I don't outline well, so usually, I kind of try to wing towards a general direction, but I end up veering off a lot.
In terms of tools, I really like the thesaurus function, which gives you the entire sentence instead of just a word. So when you look stuff up, you can actually see how it'll look and sound in context.
The only thing that annoys me is the time counter at the bottom of the window, which makes me feel like I'm writing on a schedule when I'm not... I haven't figured out how to disable it yet, but I think it can be done.
Anyway, I think it's worth checking out? Especially since it's free and all today, and it usually costs about $50.
So queenitsy made a post about Scrivener and how awesome it is awhile ago, but unfortunately, it's only for Macs. On a whim, I did some Googling for a good Windows alternative and found the same thing everywhere: nothing's as good as Scrivener, but there here are a few. Try them out, see what works, blah blah blah.
I think I did about four, including PageFour, Celtx, Liquid Story Binder, and something else that I uninstalled again after like two minutes because it was so unintuitive, I couldn't even figure out where to start typing. PageFour was a little too simple for me, but it has tabs and a word frequency counter. Celtx is much better for film scripts and possibly screeplays, but for regular writing, it's kind of useless and also a hassle. Out of these, LSB clearly came out on top. It does take some getting used to, but right off the bat, I was impressed by all the things they'd considered. When you create a project, it lets you include things like playlists and galleries of stuff that inspires the story. It also has quite a few mechanisms for setting up and viewing stuff horizontally, which I find helpful? I feel like the vertical set-up of Word makes it hard for me to be consistent sometimes because I'm always just looking at what's on the screen, which means I write from scene to scene. As a result, the tone and general direction of my writing changes a lot, especially since I don't outline well, so usually, I kind of try to wing towards a general direction, but I end up veering off a lot.
In terms of tools, I really like the thesaurus function, which gives you the entire sentence instead of just a word. So when you look stuff up, you can actually see how it'll look and sound in context.
The only thing that annoys me is the time counter at the bottom of the window, which makes me feel like I'm writing on a schedule when I'm not... I haven't figured out how to disable it yet, but I think it can be done.
Anyway, I think it's worth checking out? Especially since it's free and all today, and it usually costs about $50.