new nano toy!

omg...I just found this through the forums and I'm COMPLETELY addicted! Ok, I'm still a little trepadatious - I do not want to be learning new software when I should be just buckling down and writing, but wow...this looks *so* cool.

it's called yWriter and can be found here - http://www.spacejock.com/yWriter.html

The biggest perk is that it is a pretty simple, but powerful organizational tool - something that's been supremely lacking in my past nanos. You enter in chapter or scene headers, and it keeps them all in a list for you. You can switch to a kind of storyboard view in which your chapter summaries are on cards, then you can drag and drop cards to reorganize entire chapters!
Within each chapter/file, there's sections for "goal", "conflict" and "outcome" where you can enter specific things you want to accomplish, and little pull-down boxes that let you rank the relevance, humor, tension and quality of each section. You can further notate your files with things like "last edited on...", or place timelines and deadlines on each section. There's another pull-down menu that lets you select which character is featured in the open segment - with the click of a button you can append the current section to "set the start to the end of this character's previous scene". wowza.
The more I explore, the more I find. It's also extremely good about backing up files. It'll make an automatic copy of anything you're doing and put it in a kind of drafts file. That way, if there's a power outage, or whatnot, you can just go to the drafts file and recover everything up to the time of your last save. It also breaks saves down by day, so if you suddenly want to go back to what you were working on, say, last Tuesday, it'll be there.

It's very bare bones as far as writing goes - files are saved as text files, so there's no fonts, no colors, no spell check, and no formatting other than manual indents and carriage returns. The word counts, draft tracking, outlining, and backups are the real features here.

I think I'm going to continue writing in RoughDraft this year (http://www.rsalsbury.co.uk/rd.htm), but spend my daydreamy down time transfering files to yWriter for the word count and outline tools.

Almost November...

**addendum - here's a snippet I found in the yWriter help files that makes me even more excited to try it -

"Now you can add additional chapters:
Click File - Add (or File - New Chapter File). That's your chapter. Now change the description of the file (click once on it, in the left hand window) and call it something like Chapter 1. Press enter to set the new name.

Double-click the Chapter 1 entry in the left-hand menu. Now you're looking at the editor window, with Scene 1, Chapter 1.

Enter text, enter the protag name, save and exit.

When you click Chapter 1, the right hand window shows the scene list (just 1 at the moment)

Double-click Chapter 1 again, then choose Scene - New. Use a different protag name, enter some different text, save and exit. Now you can see two scenes in chapter 1

Go ahead and write the whole novel, in chapters and scenes. You can drag/drop scenes to rearrange them and move them from one chapter to another.

When the novel is finished, save all files combined into one. That's the one you load into word for spell, grammer checking. Fini!"

Fabby!