Okay, so we're already almost two weeks into National Novel Writing Month, that great (stressful) time of year where aspiring authors band together and support each other in finally writing that book they've been meaning to. What I've got here is a super quick roundup of some online tools that might help if you've been falling behind.
First of course is the official website, nanowrimo.org, an online community with local message boards, chat rooms, and plenty of inspiration and challenges to help you get going. They keep plenty of stats on your writing to help you see if you're on track, and how you stack up against other authors. Just be sure to update your word count regularly, and you'll see your progress bar inch steadily towards that 50k.
As for actual writing, I find that the toughest thing is getting started when you sit down. That's where 750words comes in. This is a site built around the credo of "The Writer's Way" challenging you to pump out about three pages worth of stream-of-consciousness as you start your day. The practice, known as Morning Pages, is meant to help you center yourself. It's not a blog, or a journal, but it does help keep you motivated by handing out badges as you go, and giving you cool feeback.
Once I've popped the cork for the day, I move over to Yarny, a distraction free online writing app which allows you to organize your work into drag-and-drop snippets. It also keeps track of your overall word count, and saves automatically in the cloud. If you don't trust the cloud, you can always download your work-so-far in a basic text file.
By the way - if you've ever lost your work, you know how important backing up is. If haven't yet had this happen, don't take it for granted and get a backup solution anyway! I store my stuff in a Dropbox folder, which automatically syncs online and between multiple computers, so I've always got the freshest copy on my Desktop, Laptop, and iPod.
Speaking of iPod, I spend a lot of time in transit, and love to brainstorm on the go. All my outlines and notes are drawn up in the Evernote app, which also syncs online. It's great for research too, because you can grab snippets of websites or anything else and quickly add it to your notebook.
So those are the tools. Next, probably the most important part of your writing workspace, is music.
I find that I write best to instrumental music, as lyrics tend to distract me. So most of my work is done to game soundtracks like from the Overlocked Remix community. Many others might have movie or television soundtracks that work for them as well.
As a super quick shameless self-promotion, I happen to be sort of a musician, and created plenty of instrumental music over the years. It's all online in a handful of formats, and you can find it at music.actionjay.com.
If you find yourself spending more time picking out your music and building playlists than actually writing, consider pulling up Grooveshark instead. Here you can throw in a couple tunes, turn on the radio function, and it'll automatically keep feeding you similar music.
And that's it for today's roundup. Now, just like you, it's time for me to get right back to writing!
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