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Write Your Own Novel Standard Review

Reviewed Jan 2006

We came across an interesting product from Serif.com called Write Your Own Novel Standard. It is designed to help you organize your thoughts when you are writing a novel. You can't print directly from the application but it will let you export in an RTF format.

It is useful in that it helps you keep track of characters, events, locations and relationships. If you are writing a story that has simultaneous events the timeline can really help keep things straight. The character tracker is great when you have a number of complex characters in your story.

The character tracker allows you to track birth and death dates as well as a great deal of free form information.  The even tracker will allow you to keep track of who is present at any given event.

There is a submission tracker to help you track the progress of your overtures to the publishers.

For more information, check out www.serif.com or www.gsp.cc

Oh, by the way, the cost was a whopping $10 from serif. You can't beat that.

Tips.

•  We could not establish any relationships with the characters. We realized that the 'usual name' field had to have an entry for the characters to appear in the drop down boxes

• Backups - The program tends to store your novel in with it's program files. For most people this is not a place where you normally back up files. You need to determine exactly where your novel is being stored and be sure to run regular backups to CD.

• File Location - We moved the default storage for the novel to the My Documents Folder. this seems to work fine.

Summary

Nothing will pump creativity into your cranium (the muse notwithstanding). However, a tool such as this one can help you keep things well organized. It might even be useful for creative writing or English term papers.

Last modified:  11/10/06