Writing Software

Hiveword Five Year Retrospective

Today is Hiveword’s fifth birthday! Or anniversary. Whatever you call it it’s been five years of helping writers achieve their dreams. I’m both excited and proud of that. This post is a bit of a retrospective. There will be behind-the-scenes information and maybe even a baby picture. Tomorrow I’ll have some great tips from Hiveword power users so be sure to check that out, too. But for now it’s time to get retro. In 2008 I conceived the idea for Hiveword. Man, was it going to be cool! However, I didn’t start development until 2009. Sadly, 2009 passed by. Then 2010 and still Hiveword was not available to the masses. I’m… Read More »Hiveword Five Year Retrospective

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

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

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

Character Name Generation

Ever struggle to come up with character names? Sometimes they just pop into your head wrapped in a bow. That’s pretty rare, though, at least for me. Other times I’ll see something and be inspired with a character name. (And sometimes I’ll even remember to jot it down!) More often than not, though, it’s painful to come up with character names, especially on demand. Fortunately, technology can come to our aid. If you’re old-school you probably already have a megadump of your local phone company’s database right there in your kitchen. On printed paper, no less! Just pop open that phone book and randomly point to somewhere on a page.… Read More »Character Name Generation