munsillian

Hah! Dunno where that title came from… Anyway, this is the first of a series of posts I will make on my progress in the MidSommer Madness Challenge.  I’ve decided to couple that with a review of yWriter4, free novel-writing project-management software. (Note that although I’m using v 4, that’s because 5 won’t work in Wine in Linux. Booh!) 

I’m not the only one doing this. As she has time, Michelle Marques has kindly agreed to do something similar with CELTX. 

Mwahaha! Little did she know…

Anyway, here we go.

Project Title: Bridgetown:Genesis
Scope: 100k+ words fantasy novel

Task 1 – Outlining

I chose to try yWriter4 as the tool for the outlining phase of my project, even though I know that it is designed more for creating a novel than for outlining it.  Still, this ought to make me more aware of how to use the software, as I stretch it to meet my needs.

My task was to look at the blurbs and read the first 5 pages of 3 books that are in my project genre or are otherwise useful to me.  I did that and made my notes in Gedit, a Linux text editor. I am running yWriter 4 in Wine on ubuntu 9.04 (aka Jaunty Jackalope).

Comments:

Set up a yWriter project using the wizard. Specified my Linux desktop as the place to find my files rather than the virtual PC. We’ll see what happens. Next step in the wizard is to set up chapters and add characters. Let’s see how I can finagle this without creating too many headaches down the line.

Hmm. I’m gonna go back and put everything into a folder instead.  Dumbass.

Did that. Now what?

Hmm, everything is SO geared towards writing into a chapter/scene (not a bad thing) that the only way to do this is to dedicate a Chapter to the outlining and use scenes and scene notes within that chapter. Ugly!  I’m not going to be able to use this in the outline until we get to where I start actually crafting scenes/sections/chapters.  Hmm. I think what I’ll do instead, is to table using yWriter until I get to that point, and use an outliner instead.

Later.