For all you folks who like to organize your writing (or want to start!), check out Liquid Story Binder XE from Black Obelisk Software they’re having a 50% off sale! That brings the price down to $22.95. If you like to storyboard, or outline or just dump all your ideas into one place, check this software out. There’s a bit of a learning curve, but there’s a downloadable .pdf manual available with some good tutorials.

I’m mainly a pantser – I don’t do a lot of outlining or pre-planning – but I’ve found it a really useful way to keep a lot of information for one project in one place and easily accessible. It’s also fun to find pics online of characters or places and then upload them into the program, so you’ll always have a visual cue to refer to. The character templates are pretty detailed and customizable.

I’m currently using it for Nano, but also for putting together my synopsis for Soul Cavern. There’s a document type called Builder, where you can put in a header like you would an outline, then write longer text beneath it. When you choose to merge, you select the headers you want and it will merge the longer text of those headers together in the order you have them in. So I’ve put the major plot points as the headers, then written a sentence or two about each and when I merge, I get a decent rough draft for my synopsis. I still have to go back through and make transitions and such, but this seems to really be working for me! I suppose you could do that with the entire book, using the Builder, but there’s also a separate doc type for Chapters.

There’s a 30 day free trial, so you can check it out before you buy.

And for the record, I’m not affiliated with them in any way nor am I being compensated for the plug. I just think it’s good software for a really great discount!