I just got an e-mail informing me that StoryMill is on sale for $29.95 until November 3rd.

For those of you with Macs who are looking for an inexpensive novel writing program, this would be the cheapest at the moment.  I’m considering it even though I don’t really like it…

I cave in too easily.  I’m the type of person who buys something he’ll never use “because it was on sale.”

I must resist!

So for those of you who will read this, I was wondering how do you start off your novels, books, or stories? I was trying to think of ways to do it, but so far I just throw the reader into a situation and hope they can accept it.
If it was in the first person, I might consider saying “Well, one time…” and flashback and start the story, but I don’t really like those types of book openings. I sometimes do, but it depends how well the writer pulls it off. If it’s a journal or something, then that’s okay, or if you start off with someone at a bar or in a stormy night and they decide to tell a story, then that too is okay.
If it’s a fictional mythological fairy tale like story, then I guess it’s okay to start off with “Once upon a time” or “There once was a …” and etc. Sometimes it can be used for a slightly humorous or interesting start for a story even if it isn’t a fairy tale, but I’m not sure how well it can be pulled off.
In some Sci-Fi stories, the book starts off with a back-ground story or information, like “In a galaxy far far away…” or “Somewhere off in an alternate dimension…” I think it’s good if you’re making your own world, but not for stories based in this world.
So dear reader, for those of you who are writing, how do you plan to start off you book or how have you started books before?

So, a lot of people have been looking at WriteRoom and wondering if it is truly worth spending $25 for. A lot of people out there say, “No, spend your money elsewhere and get a free alternative like JDarkRoom” or something else.
I say if you’re on Windows or Linux, there are better free alternatives (Like RubyRoom or textRoom). On Mac though, we’re pretty much stuck with the choice of WriteRoom or JDarkRoom for our full-screen just a simple text-editor purposes. You could install MacPorts or Fink to get the dependencies of RubyRoom, PyRoom, and etc installed on your Mac, then play around with it until it works, but it still doesn’t provide the features that WriteRoom provides.
The closest thing on Mac that’ll provide what WriteRoom does is MacVim, but that requires some tweaking and a lot of getting used to. JDarkRoom (in my opnion) is a good start, but it’s no where close to WriteRoom yet.
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So I got my laptop back today!  Yay for me!
But I realized I have less than a week left to restore and tune my PC.  Then NaNoWriMo starts and the challenge begins!  Wish me luck.  I’ll try to keep people updated with the different things going on, decent tutorials on things I’ve done/am doing, and sharing parts of my story (if I deem it sharable).
So please stay tuned and enjoy what you read.

Remember, reading enhanced the imagination and expands one’s mind!…
Or at least that’s a poor paraphrase of what my mom told me as a kid.

Okay, so I know I posted about how I didn’t like it earlier, but I’ve had a change of heart.

Storyist is actually pretty cool.  Feature wise, it has more than some of the other things out there.  It is better at helping you plan and manage your novel by default.   I found out that some of the features I was complaining about are actually there, but it takes more effort than compared to the other applications out there.

So now that I’ve learned how to get it to do what I want, I really like it.  It’s now a tie between Scrivener, Storyist, and Jer’s Novel Writer.

What I really like about Storyist (besides the program) is their friendly user forum.  The users there are great to talk and chat with.  Steve (the main developer) is on there and he’s quite friendly (not that developers of other software are mean or something).  Most of the posts I’ve read so far aren’t about the program.  Sure there’s a forum for getting help or feature requests for the program, but what makes the forum better is that a majority of the posts are about people’s lives, projects, books their working on, and etc.  There isn’t too much of that on the other forums of writing software I’ve been on.  And when you ask for help, the people don’t say, “RTFM.”  They point you in the right direction and everything.

I’ll go more indepth with this software when I get my mac back (been playing on it with a friends mac).  I’ll also go in depth with some of the other programs I like.

I just thought I’d start with Storyist as I felt bad for bashing them in one of my previous posts after I learned what I said was wrong (even though other people I asked said it couldn’t be done as well, guess I should have asked people who actually write with Storyist instead).

Anyways, a link to Storyist has been added to the links section at the bottom of this page.  Wish me luck on picking what to use for NaNoWriMo.