Hiveword

Hiveword Updates

Hiveword update time! Notes The big news is notes that you can attach to pretty much anything — scenes, characters, etc. The notes are taggable and you can view all of them in one place with a powerful filter for finding what you want. Notes are part of the Hiveword Plus upgrade. I’ll talk more about notes in my next post. Plotlines The Scenes by Plotline page lists scenes vertically and then plotlines as horizontally. This allows you to quickly see how plotlines weave throughout your scenes. The feature itself has been around for a while but the plotlines were ordered by name. Since users can manually sort plotlines it… Read More »Hiveword Updates

Track Anything with Custom Types and Fields

You know what the problem is with novel organizers? They let you track characters and scenes and such but they don’t let you track magic spells. Or starships. Or whatever else is important to you. I’m pleased to say that this problem is solved in Hiveword. You can now track anything you want in Hiveword. Spells and starships, sure, but you can also track political parties, countries, warring clans, fancy hats, guilds, ice cream, monsters, books, weapons, etc. You can even track intangible things such as writing prompts or notes for key plot points. What you track depends on your needs and creativity. In Hiveword parlance each thing is called a… Read More »Track Anything with Custom Types and Fields

Updates: Sorting stories and naming characters

Many folks have asked for the ability to sort stories and to refer to characters by something other then first names. These changes are available now. First, story sorting… Stories used to be presented in alphabetical order. This is perfect until it’s not. 😉 For example, folks might want to group a novel series together, put their most recent work at the top, etc. To allow for diverse story sorting needs you can now manually sort your stories in the same way that you would sort scenes or characters. Simply use the Sort button on the Dashboard (aka story list) and you’ll be on your way to ordering your stories as… Read More »Updates: Sorting stories and naming characters

Hiveword on the Typehammer podcast

Just a quick update… Typehammer is a podcast for writers. In their latest episode the hosts talk about my favorite app — Hiveword! 🙂 It starts around the 13:50 mark if you want to hear the Hiveword piece but the rest of it is worth a listen, too.  

Gender and Sexual Orientation

Just a quick update… Gender Boy, have I gotten email for having just Male and Female in the gender dropdown! So, now, by popular demand, you can specify anything you’d like for gender. Sexual Orientation There’s now a field for tracking a character’s sexual orientation. There ya go — short and sweet. I hope you like these changes and keep the requests coming!  

Organizing Chapters in Hiveword

2015 is getting off to a strong start with another Hiveword feature — Chapters! In a book, a chapter is comprised of one or more scenes. The grouping of the scenes in a chapter has a purpose — perhaps it’s comprised of one particular plotline, or a new character comes along, or whatever your heart desires. The chapter feature in Hiveword allows you to organize your chapters by specifying a summary or purpose and by assigning scenes to those chapters. Let’s see how it works… First of all, chapters get first class treatment with their own menu: You’ll see that the Chapters menu is consistent with characters, settings, etc., in… Read More »Organizing Chapters in Hiveword

Copying characters, settings, and items between stories

The Hive’s been buzzing lately with new features! As of today you can now copy characters, settings, and items between stories in Hiveword. Copying saves a ton of time if you are working on a series and need to get the same characters, for example, in each story. I’d like to point out these are indeed “copies.” Copies are a snapshot of the source data at the time of the copy. Using a character as an example, this means that the original character and the copied character can change independently. In other words, the characters are not linked. I did it this way because a character’s “wants” in Story A could… Read More »Copying characters, settings, and items between stories

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