Mike Fleming

New Hiveword Features: Track Items, Sort Stuff, and More

Based upon your suggestions Hiveword has some new features today: Track items or objects Manually sort characters, locations, plotlines, and items Automatic scene numbering New city, state/province, and country fields for settings Track Items You can track important items (or “objects” if you’d prefer to call them that) just like you do for settings, for example. You’ll now find an “Items” menu item which allows you to add a new item and list or sort them. Here’s an example item: As you can see there’s nothing new to learn here. Just create an item an describe it. You can also add tags as usual. Once you have an item you… Read More »New Hiveword Features: Track Items, Sort Stuff, and More

How to Prepare for NaNoWriMo

NaNoWriMo is sneaking up on you. It’s lurking in the shadows, inching ever closer, hoping to suck you into its voracious maw on November first.  And on that day it would be most unfortunate to be unprepared. Conceiving a story and rambling on to meet the word count will likely make for a bloody mess thirty days later. It doesn’t have to be that way. Now is the time to prepare for NaNaWriMo. How? By putting on your thinking cap in general and using Hiveword’s suite of tools for writers in particular. The Hiveword platform is comprised of: The Hiveword novel organizer A set of prompts (integrated with the novel… Read More »How to Prepare for NaNoWriMo

New Features in Hiveword

On Sunday I deployed a new version of Hiveword consisting primarily of user requests. So, keep those comments a-comin’! Here’s what’s new: Scene Insertion Tag phrases Neutral characters MyWKB bug fixes Scene Insertion Clicking the New Scene button has always added a new scene to the end of your scene list. That works great if you can create your scenes in the correct, complete order from the get-go. You can’t? Shame on you. For you, the scene sorter! However, Doug M. hit me over the head and said why not allow scene insertion? You know, the ability to add a scene directly where you want it in the list of… Read More »New Features in Hiveword

Hiveword review by Lynn Viehl

Lynn Viehl posted a review of Hiveword today on her blog.  Check it out at http://pbackwriter.blogspot.com/2012/09/hiveword.html. Thanks, Lynn!

Free online novel writing software for NaNoWriMo

You know NaNoWriMo is going to be here before you know it, right? Now’s the time to get a jump start on prepping your novel before the writing process begins in November. Don’t waste writing time figuring out scenes, characters, plotlines, and all that jazz  in the heat of Nano — it’ll just slow you down and maybe make you miss your goal. You don’t want that. What you might want is a free, web-based novel organizer to help you through the planning process. That’s right, Hiveword is now free so you can use it any day, any time, any where, as much as you want for no cost. Use… Read More »Free online novel writing software for NaNoWriMo

Personalized Writer’s Knowledge Base

If you’ve used the Writer’s Knowledge Base (WKB) you know it’s a search engine that only contains articles relevant to writers. Search for “plot” and you’ll only get articles on how to plot your novel and not the myriad contexts that Google would give you. The WKB works great for that. However, the WKB could be so much more. Something a bit more personal. So, Elizabeth and I are  pleased to announce the launch of MyWKB. It’s the same good ol’ WKB but tailored to you. What’s it do? You can List and sort articles without searching See which articles you’ve read See your search history This is just the… Read More »Personalized Writer’s Knowledge Base

Planning Your Novel

I wrote about novel planning over at Mystery Writing is Murder yesterday. Learn about why a little organization can save tons of time along with some ways of going about it. Check it out here.

Reverse Engineering Your Novel

One of the nice things about working on the Writer’s Knowledge Base is that I see A LOT of writing articles pass by. I don’t have time to read all of them, of course, but M.E. Summer’s post “Kate Beckett’s Murder Board: Reverse Engineering Your Story” caught my eye just from the title alone. “Reverse Engineering.” Hey, that’s a technical term and I’m a technical guy (plus I probably know what she’s going to say and it’s right up my alley.) Then, there’s this “Murder Board” thing and that puppy sounds interesting! Check out M.E.’s post and then come back. (I’ll start the Jeopardy music…) Nice post, right?   I… Read More »Reverse Engineering Your Novel

Location Generation

In my last post I talked about how to generate character names so that you don’t have to spend time and brain power coming up with them yourself. This time I’m going to talk about how to generate settings.  Well, geographic places, at least. Perhaps your story hops around the world to exotic locales. Or maybe you just want to spice up some characters by giving them interesting hometowns. In either case you need to come up with some places and, if you’re like me, you’ll come up with Paris. Or maybe London. Closer to home it’s likely to be places you already know, too. In either case you can… Read More »Location Generation