More shinies

My evil plot seems to be on the verge of success, so here are more pretties to tempt some of my favorite writers into writing more:

yWriter
I tinkered with it for a few minutes. It's a little on the clunky side, in my opinion, but it's got the advantage of simplicity on its side, and it's free.

Liquid Story Binder XE
The opposite of simple, but man does it look cool. I spent more than a few minutes tinkering with it, and I'm still not sure I'd know where to start if I intended to use it for real. It's free to try, and not horribly expensive to buy.

Power Writer
I've been using this for Crowmaker, and I wrote "Wings" in its entirety on it. (Although once I had a mostly-complete ms, I exported it to RTF and did all my final formatting and editing in Word.) It had a little bit of a learning curve, but you can demo it and there are built-in tutorials to get you started. So far I'm liking it really well--it follows a format similar to what I'd do with a dozen or so individual Word documents if left to my own devices, but it's all in one place. Down sides: The undo function works spottily, if at all, it seems a bit buggy now and then with copy and paste, and there's no simple way to export the text from the non-word processor windows into a simple word processor-accessible file. Not a big deal, unless you decide mid-document to stop using Power Writer. There also seem to be some issues with having to uninstall from one machine before you can install to a different one, which could cause problems for those using more than one machine. And it is also a bit on the pricier side. (The equivalent of two average-priced new release video games, to put it into perspective.) A word of warning if you decide to try the demo: DO NOT write a ton of new story into the demo version. Copy and paste is disabled, and you can't access the Power Writer file with a plain old word processor later if you don't buy Power Writer. (No, I didn't write an entire story into the demo. But I started to, and if I hadn't decided to buy it in the end, I'd have had to do some re-typing to get myself squared away before the demo ran out.)

Sonar
Not writing software, but a nifty submissions tracker from the same guy who put together yWriter. Like yWriter, it's simple and it's free. I downloaded it and have been giving it a try. So far, I'm liking it. I'll keep you posted if my opinion changes once I've actually had something to, you know, track for a while.

Enjoy!

NOTE: I have since stopped using PowerWriter and am now using WriteWay. I mention my initial reaction to WriteWay in this entry. So far, my good opinion is still holding up.