With NaNoWriMo approaching, I have been wondering what to use to write my book. After a cursory search around the internet - looking at products such as yWriter and NewNovelist, I came to a startling conclusion - it’s all unnecessary crap.
It strikes me that the software I already use to author software is more than capable for writing a book.
Here is the software I’m going to be using, and why;
Textpad
http://www.textpad.com
Textpad is a text editor. It’s a commercial program, but it’s not expensive. The good thing about it is that it deals with plain old text files - which of course any text editor on any platform can deal with. Textpad has spell checking built in, you can work on multiple files simultaneously, and can remember your session - so next time you launch it your work comes straight back. It’s also greasy fast and solid as a rock.
Tortoise SVN
http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org
Tortoise is a free Subversion client, and Subversion is a magical piece of software used by developers to safeguard the version history of files. As long as I check files in at the end of each day, it means I can look back at what I wrote or changed over time - and not lose anything significant along the way. Significantly, TortoiseSVN is happy to manage it’s own repository - you don’t need a seperate server.
WinMerge
http://www.winmerge.org
WinMerge is another freebie, and dovetails with TortoiseSVN to provide nice colour coded comparison of files. If I cannot remember what changes I made to a file between today and last wednesday, I can select the two dated version in Tortoise SVN, and pop them open in WinMerge to compare alongside each other.
FreeMind
http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
FreeMind is a mind manager utility. It’s free (as the name suggests) and helps you break big complicated things down into smaller bits. For software projects this tends to be work packages, classes and methods - for a novel it will be chapters, characters, and so on.
WordPress
http://www.wordpress.com
I’ll be publishing the results of my scrawling at the end of each day during November on the internet via WordPress - by far the best blogging platform in existence in my opinion. Again, this is completely free.
So there you go - my low-tech tools for NaNoWriMo. If you do a lot of writing, what will you be using, and why?