March 28, 2024
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A couple of years ago I tried to do the national novel writing month contest. The contest does not really have judged winners and losers but it is actually a month long race in November to try to write a 50,000 word novel. Thousands of people try and quite a few actually do complete it. This year I was smart enough to know that I would not be able to find enough time to write 5o,000 words in the month for my novel “Hooker”.

I still look at the message boards at the Nanowrimo site occasionally and found a neat couple of pieces of free writing software.

The first piece of freeware is called Q10 and after either installing or running the portable version of Q10 you get a black screen that just has plain type on ot. This is a full screen text editor and it designed to be simple and uncluttered. The great thing about Q10 is that it has absolutely no distractions, not even menus. To find out how to use it you need to get the keyboard shortcuts by pressing the F1 key while running the software.

One other great thing about Q10 is that you can drop some sounds in there that are supplied on the website and these will allow you to have electric typewriter sounds while you are typing. I have not heard these sounds in years so it was really great to use.

The second piece of freeware that I found is called YWriter3 this software is for storyboarding and scene creation when you are writing a story or novel. I checked out YWriter last year and it was OK but this new version is even better. You can imagine if I am mentioning a piece of storyboarding freeware on a tech blog that it must be good to mention. If you are writing or want to write a book I think that YWriter is probably indespensible.