So what is your essential load out while writing?
For the actual writing itself, I use Q10 instead of Word. It's a free, highly customizable processor, with a lot of gadgets that seem specifically designed for Nano. It has an on screen word count, a timer that after you set it, it counts how many words you typed during that run (perfect for word wars), and for aesthetic reasons, an option to make your key strokes sound softly like the clicking of a typewriter. Kind of soothing. :) I like running it fullscreen, with a black background and blue text. With a black background the monitor isn't letting off light (like with a white one) so my eyes don't dry out as fast.
Q10: http://www.baara.com/q10/
If we're somewhere with wifi, I also tend to use Pandora for my music selection. It's nice because it's easy to set up stations that match the mood of what you're writing about. It was a life saver last year for me.
I've been toying with going to Google Docs, if only to save me endless heartache if my hard drive dies and the added convenience of never needing the same computer to write from. It's Google's free writing program that saves your files remotely, so that you can access and edit them anywhere by just logging into Gmail.
Just for fun, once the road is far past, a program that Nano pointed out a few years ago is definitely a cool way to see your achievement in an artistic manner. It's called Wordle, and it makes your novel into a collage of words, the size of them based on how often the word appears in your book. It's really neat, and I had my second Nano's collage as my background at work for a long time.
Anything you all use or suggest to the rest of us?
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Oct 16, 2009 - 19 33
As I'm using my netbook for the first time, I'm waffling between Abiword, which is also free and works very like Word, and Liquid Story Binder, which is not free once your 30 days are up. yWriter is supposed to cover a lot of the things that LSB does, but I'm not relly comfortable with it either yet.
Google docs is a godsend. I love it and I use it all the time. I also use Evernote, which has a potential desktop component for both Mac or PC and can work with iPodTouch/iPhone. I recommend using both of them as well as emailing random copies to yourself and keeping more than one memory stick. After the T-Mobile Sidekick disaster over last weekend, where the people who make their living preserving our data upgraded a system without doing a backup, I like to spread my egg into as many baskets as I can.
I've never heard of wordle, but it sounds cool.
----------Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children that dragons can be killed. - G.K. Chesterton
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Oct 17, 2009 - 17 02
Thanks for mentioning Pandora Radio. I tried it out after seeing it on this post and I really like it a lot. I'll be using it a lot for Nano, so it seems. And I'm about to check out Q10.
I hope I like that too.
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Oct 17, 2009 - 21 31
Q10's very simple, but I like that. It doesn't (by default) show misspellings and grammatical errors, so you don't have that same urge to correct them like with Word. It's just efficient and easy.
Glad you like Pandora. I actually subscribed to them this year, just to support them, but it's the same product regardless. I've found so much new music through them it's unreal. :)
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Oct 20, 2009 - 11 11
okay, that wordle one is awesome :)
----------LDWA
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I prefer to think of myself as pre-published. --t-shirt on cafepress :)
1,198 / 50,000
Oct 20, 2009 - 18 32
Yeah, I spent way too much time on it last year. lol
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Nov 1, 2009 - 19 24
www.refdesk.com for dictionary, thesaurus, quotes, news and diversions
www.lastFM.com for music... you can make it a toolbar widget on FireFox or Explorer instead of it taking up a whole page and bugging you every 2 hours to ask if "you're there."
And, you can turn off the editor and spell-check on Word if it bothers you! Tools; Options: Spelling & Grammar tab. Uncheck the stuff there.
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Nov 2, 2009 - 09 20
And, you can turn off the editor and spell-check on Word if it bothers you! Tools; Options: Spelling & Grammar tab. Uncheck the stuff there.
Of course, but it's a pain, and Q10 is far easier on the eyes. Either way though.
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