Had a minor setback yesterday, getting carried away with a new writing software program, and spending most of the day playing around with it to see if it would work with my idiosyncrasies. So far, it’s working pretty well. The software is Liquid Story Binder, and, though it’s not exactly what I want, it is growing on me.

I actually really like the Fullscreen mode, which is what I wrote in for tonight’s writing. Nice white background, with wide margins, so it’s easy to read, and work with the text. I don’t care for the way the windows seem fake. Not sure how else to describe it. It’s certainly not a standard, windows-based design. It reminds me of a mindmapping, relational database program I tried to use a few years ago. Had to ditch it – just too alien.

So far, though, I was able to knock out my writing. I also like the Builder feature and see how easy it is to move scenes around. Actually moved one or two today. I also like its export capabilities. Works rather smooth. I can write in any format that is comfortable for me (1.5 space, extra space between paragraphs, dialogue, etc), but when I export it, everything is put together into single space, no extra returns, and I can then jam that RTF file into OpenOffice and use the Heading options to make mass changes in formatting. So much better than trying to hard code everything in a word processor.

I tried a few more today (which is why I didn’t finish writing until 11pm), but they were most often really buggy. Couldn’t even get yWriter to launch (which is okay, didn’t care for the look of its editor), and FourPage was somewhat promising, but had problems importing, and didn’t have some features that I really wanted.

I wish I could get Scrivener, but couldn’t get it to work. One major drawback of LBN is the inability to use the other features from the builder data. I don’t want to start from a timeline, but work almost entirely in a builder, and would like the option of seeing the scenes in timeline mode. This option is available in both Scrivener and yWriter. Of course, a program has to actually work before it’s effective.

Regardless, got my goals met today! It was a good day.