![]() ![]() Bubkes (which I’ve also seen spelled as bupkis, bupkes, and bupkus – but I digress…). There are numerous options, but this one is particularly attractive for its price: nada. My one-line summary: Nothing but notecards, and at no cost – sweet!Īfter bailing on Scrivener and choking on Writers Blocks’ price tag, I began searching for some other products that offer a computer equivalent of pinning notecards (or pressing sticky-notes) on a bulletin board. With Scrivener finally available on PC, I’ll be interested to see whether Writers Blocks considers lowering its prices. However, I think the price is rather high, at least in comparison to the other tools currently available. I’ve been aware of Writers Blocks for a while now, and over the years this software has become more and more feature-rich, and it’s worth checking out as an alternative to Scrivener. Writers Blocks is another powerful piece of writing software that uses the notecard metaphor, with an emphasis on providing the ability to easily move those cards (or blocks) around as you build and tweak your book idea. ![]() So I looked around for other software that offered something similar, and found one that is definitely a top contender. I’m a visual guy, so that sort of thing is really helpful, because I lack the desk space or handwriting skill to use actual physical 3×5 cards or Post-its. ![]() Probably my favorite feature in Scrivener is the corkboard, which gives you a virtual bulletin board on which to pin your ideas in the form of note cards. My one-line summary: Powerful features made less attractive by a hefty price tag. So although I no longer use Scrivener, I highly recommend it as a tool worth checking out. My long-winded point is, I may have found that Scrivener crowded my screen too much simply because I use a computer with such a skimpy monitor. So I bought a $300 Acer, and will be happy if it lasts as long as a pack of disposable razors. This is probably not a smart move for a writer, but I became so fed up with how quickly my big super-ultra-mega-awesome laptops or computers would become either hopelessly slow and buggy or flat-out killed by some asshat virus, so I finally decided to start treating my computers as disposable commodities. And I sometimes felt all the various tools and windows that are available in Scrivener began to take over my screen, making the window where I did my actual writing seem like a bit of an afterthought.īUT – and this is a big but (yes, I like big buts, and I cannot lie…) – it’s important to note that A) Scrivener is highly configurable, so you can control what tools and windows are visible, as well as their size and B) I use a tiny little netbook as my main computer. I felt like I was spending more time making sure I gave Scrivener all the information it needed, and less time actually writing. I used Scrivener for several weeks, and while I’m highly impressed with all the functions this software offers, to me it ultimately became more than I wanted to deal with. Check out WU contributor Jeanne Kisacky’s excellent write-up on the PC release of Scrivener here.Īs you’ll see at the Scrivener website, this is an extremely full-featured tool for writers, offering organizational tools, text editing, a wonderful “corkboard” interface and more. A longtime favorite with Mac users, in 2011 Scrivener also became available for PC. Many of you may already be familiar with this tool. My one-line summary: Tons of features make this a suite of tools worth exploring. Price: $40-45, depending on operating system Let’s start with one of the most popular ones. The good news is that there are a LOT of choices out there. I’m still a big fan of cheap, so again I’ll focus primarily on the most affordable tools I’ve recently encountered, with a couple of more expensive options as well. But I think it’s possible that could change as I delve deeper into my Latest Attempt at Literary Awesomeness (or, LALA). But in this case, I haven’t worked with all of these yet, and none of them have yet become indispensable to me as a writer. In my previous post on the topic, I focused on tools that I use regularly. Since that time, I’ve become aware of several more pieces of technology that writers might find useful, so I thought I’d share them with you, along with my initial impressions of these tools. Last year I wrote a post about some inexpensive high-tech tools that I found useful as a writer, and the response I received suggested that this was a pretty hot topic. ![]()
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