Wot, no newsletter?
Some of you may have noticed that there hasn’t been a newsletter for a couple of weeks, there is a perfectly good reason… no internet signal, because, we’ve been on holiday.
Sometimes, you just need a break away.
As writer, our brains are often active, pumping out all sorts of words, always making decisions, and every now and then, our brains need a rest… so, we went on holiday. We played the best game of tetris with our car, jamming everything we needed into it, except the kitchen sink, and even managed (somehow) to fit in the 6 man tent, a fridge, kitchenette, carpet, chandelier and more (okay, some of those items may not have actually come with us, and I’ll let you guess which ones they may be). After driving for what seemed like hours, we looked at the satnav to see that we still had the same amount of time left to drive, so we pulled into a motorway services and had a rest. On the road again, we noticed that the 4 hours and 30 minutes the satnav had time travelled again, and we now seemed to have even more hours to reach our destination, so, we stopped looking at the clock, and started looking at the mileage we had left instead. We got half way down the motorway, and I remembered my crutches. Too late to turn back, I decided to buy a walking stick from somewhere while we were away. We arrived in Devon, on the edge of Dartmoor, with just enough time to put up the tent, and grab some food, yay. It rained, and drizzled for about half the time, but that didn’t bother us. We still managed to stay warm, and dry. Visiting Dartmoor, Morwellham Quay, Dartmoor Prison, doing the Tavistock trail, and more, were definitely highlights of our trip, and a chance to visit some fam while we were away too. During the wet days, my wife started up her journaling again, and I have had the chance to try out some more writing software.
Changing my writing setup
Since starting as an author, and as a techie, I have tested out many pieces of software for writing, originally opting for Scrivener (for writing), Pro-writing Aid (for editing) and Vellum (for formatting) my books. While this all worked flawlessly on my mac, it was great, until my mac stopped receiving updates. No updates means that I need to spend money on a new macbook, and that can get expensive, so I switched to Windows. This plagued me with all sorts of problems, always running out of memory, constantly spammed with ads, and having to keep up with security updates which would reboot my computer in the middle of writing. I needed another solution. I considered Linux, and tried out manuskript, and while that seemed okay, it didn’t seem to have the growth room I needed as a plotter, to be able to integrate my characters, worldbuilding and more. Don’t get me wrong, manuskript is a great program, but i needed something else. So, I bit the bullet and bought, a chromebook! Then I downloaded novelist. Novelist is a fantastic free android app (which works really well on my chromebook), and it allows me to instantly see my outline, and tag all characters, locations, and more to my chapters. It works offline, and even allows me to upload my books to google drive (yay for cloud backups). This means I can instantly see which characters were in the last chapter I wrote, and how they work within my story. I love novelist, but my thirst for the ultimate program lead me to download…. novelWriter for linux. So, I am now back on linux, (yay for free updates) which is great, because it works on any of my equipment, and also allows me to tag characters in a similar way to novelist. novelWriter works offline too, and that means I can work without needing internet access. The layout is very professional, and almost Scrivener-like, without the steep learning curve of Scrivener. It runs on linux, windows, and macos, which means it runs nicely on my chromebook, so I can take my work with me anywhere I go. It also means I can still backup my work to google drive, yay Once I had copy-pasted all my chapters from novelist and popped them into novelWriter, it was a very easy process to carry on writing my book, which I have been doing ever since we got back home. So that’s what we’ve been up to for the last couple of weeks, and now we are nicely rested, we are hitting the ground running, and I have already edited several chapters.
Thanks for reading, and for supporting me, even though you haven’t seen me for the last couple of weeks, I really appreciate the love you all give, and I am really looking forward to the day (and it’s coming soon) where I can share more about the latest book I am writing.
Take care, happy reading.
