Twentieth

Nothing much going on just now. My colleague has been seconded to Belfast for a week, so I have the office to myself for a time. I've taken the opportunity to bring my iBook in so that I can try to get on with some writing of my own. When I think about it, my colleague probably wouldn't mind if I brought it in before, but it just seems a bit cheeky tbh.

Like so many people, I am "writing a novel". Except I really am. I've been dragging my feet for a long time about it, but I've grit my teeth and I'm pushing ahead with it for now. I've read that one of the most important things you have to do if you want to get some serious writing done is to set aside a block of time on a  regular basis and devote it to writing - half an hour or an hour each night, for example. I've been semi-successful in this part, and I've been making some headway.
Unfortunately, I lack any kind of 'proper' training in how to organise my thoughts or lay out material for a book in any kind of order, so my thoughts and ideas have been recorded in longhand in my trusty notebook. Large chunks of it are in sequential order, but are filled with re-writes and alternate wordings. For example, I'll start writing a scene, and it will continue for a page or so, then without any discernible break on the page I'll immediately go back and start rewriting dialogue or descriptions on the fly, without amending the original text to reflect the changes.
Also, my train of thought frequently derails or detours, and I'll start writing a scene, then suddenly shoot off and scribble notes about a character or plot point that has absolutely nothing to do with the scene I'm writing. I tired to combat this by writing on the iBook instead of my notebook (which makes sense as I end up having to type it in anyway) which only partially succeeded. I found that when I did rewrite a passage, I was going back and actually rewriting it by deleting the original text. Although part of me quailed at the thought of casually discarding each precious word, I kept reminding myself that I was a good thing and that 90% of writing is actually rewriting. However, the format of a Word document (or NeoOffice document to be precise) didn't lend itself to my 'creative process', so that the text ended up being full of single line ideas, snatches of dialogue, or the outline of an idea, dotted at random intervals.
However, I was reading this link on Penny Arcade the other day, and for some reason or another, followed it to the VoodooPad site. It's Mac only, so I don't know how many of you out there will actually get use from it, but I think I've fallen in love. It's marketed as a 'desktop wiki'. In a similar fashion to Excel, you can create sheets in each document, and display them in tabs, but function-wise, it's nothing at all like Excel. By naming a tab, you can automatically create a hyperlink to every instance of that name in any tab in the document.
For example, my main character is called 'Calvin' just now. I use the first tab in the document to write the actual novel, either by typing directly into it if I'm already happy with the words in my head, or by copying and pasting from wherever they are already. Each time the word 'Calvin' appears in the text, regardless of context, it will be hyperlinked to the tab called 'Calvin', in which I keep all of my random thoughts, scribbles and ideas for Calvin, no matter what they are, and no matter what order they come in.

I realise that's not the best description, and doesn't even come close to sharing just how exciting this program is, but if you have a Mac, please go and check it out, you can download the Lite version for free and miss out of some of the functionality, or you can download the regular version and use it for free if you don't mind having some restrictions placed on how much you can do with it. Even if you aren't a Mac user, I'd recommend checking it out, as there are some videos there showing what it can do, much better than I have described it here.

You'll note that I never claimed to be a good writer.