Hiveword user Matt N. requested a cool feature: show scene summaries in the scenes list. What a great idea! Here’s a screenshot: As you can see, summaries are included with the normal scene information. By default, the summaries are not displayed. To show them, simply click the Show Summaries checkbox. To save vertical scrolling, only 600 characters of a summary are displayed. The idea is to give you a taste of what the scene is about. To see the whole summary simply click on the scene link to go to the scene detail page. Filters work like they always have. In the screenshot there is an active filter so non-matching scenes are… Read More »Scene List Summaries

You can now track notes in Hiveword Plus*. Notes can be attached to most things: stories, scenes, characters, etc. You can also have unattached notes that are not part of any story. Here’s an example of notes for a scene: The notes popup is embedded in the scene page. The normal scene textboxes and such are right below the notes so you can refer to your notes if needed or close the notes popup to get it out of your way. The notes textbox is resizable and the entire notes popup is, too, so you can see exactly what you want. There is no limit to the number of notes you can… Read More »Tracking Notes

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

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

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

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.  

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

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