A Writing Update, or, other adventures in blocking oneself

Figured it being so long since I posted updates, I felt compelled to post a writing update.

The short of it is, writing continues. I’m currently working on query letters for agents for Chrysalis, as well as working on a new novel. I’d share more details on the new novel (it isn’t the second book of Niki’s story like I had meant to work on), but the story behind that is actually a little long and the subject of a much longer blog post in the future.

One of the things slowing me down, besides the day job, is my continued flailing around to find the right tool for the job. Ideally, anything I settle on needs to work on the Chromebook (at least for the near future), which means it has to be online in some way. I’ve tried a couple of different solutions, and kept falling back on Google Docs. Not because I like Docs particularly, but because of all its evils (chief being it begins to choke on large size documents, but also because I occasionally need to try moving scenes around, and Docs is just a monolithic editor in that scenario) I keep trying other things.

So this week I stumbled on Novelize. So far, I like it. It’s missing some of the aesthetic refinements that I can get with Google Docs, which IMHO is really a contender as an office document writer online, but then it makes up for it with some nice bonus features. Scenes and chapters are discrete units – and you can move them around. I haven’t tried exporting from it yet (will soon as a test), but all in all it has a nice set of management tools that let you track and work on your novel without getting trapped in a single document structure.

Now back to writing.