Hubby is away on some game-related networking thing:ie so I have the whole evening to myself and I’ve decided to the make the most of it. I’m going to watch an episode or two of Vampire Diaries, drink some wine, have some fruit salad and probably end it all with some reading. Sounds like a perfect evening to me.

I love music and I love all kind of music. Since we moved back to the UK I’ve enjoyed catching up on what’s popular over here at the moment. One of my favourites are Mumford and Sons and their song Little Lion Man. It’s just brilliant!

And just to prove that I have a hillbilly bone or two in me I’ll admit that Blake Shelton is a favourite of mine

Yes, I admit that sometimes I’m easily distracted from my writing. There are just so many fun things that want my attention. YouTube-clips, e-mail, websites… just too much going on at the same time so I can’t block it out. Not to mention the distraction I can get from an ordinary word processor – I can easily get caught up in formatting the text while I’m writing and spending far too much time on changing fonts or headings instead of doing any actual writing.

But now I’ve found a great software that helps me to tune out most of the distractions. It’s called WriteMonkey and it’s free.

It’s super-easy to install, only thing is that in it’s default state it looks pretty grim. I think it was black background with green text or something like that. But the good news is that this software is very customisable. You can change lots of things including the background and text colour.

As you can see it’s pretty bare, very minimalistic. It covers your whole screen so you won’t see anything else while you write. It’s basically a typewriter on steroids.

A feature that I really like is that, if you want to, you can add a status bar on the screen that shows all kinds of different information. I have my status bar in the lower left corner of my screen and I’ve chosen to display Words (i.e. the word count). Partial is a feature that lets you set up different “goals” i.e. how many words you want to write etc and furthest to the right is the filename.

The files are saved as regular text-files which is great as they can then easily be opened in another word processor if you’d like.

For me this software is especially great when I free write. When I go back over what I’ve written to edit it and rework it I actually prefer to work in a “proper” word processor as I feel that gives me a better view of the material. But when it’s about to just get every little word out of me, WriteMonkey is the software of my choice.

In the past I’ve never written anything longer than a short story but now that I’m embarking on my journey towards a proper book I’m starting to wonder how to organise it all.

I mean, there will be lots of information about characters, locations, plots, dialogues, research etc. I can’t envision myself to sit down and write the whole book from start to finish. Instead I see it as a large jigsaw puzzle where the pieces has to be marked and sorted and then appropriately stored so I can find them when I need them.

At the moment I’m using a software called Action Outline (price from $39.95, free demo available at Action Outline). I’ve used it before for other purposes and it seems pretty neat for this case as well.

It’s actually a great tool if you want to collect information in one place. With the help of a tree structure I can easily store all kind of information in a relatively clear way. I think this will work great for me as a tool to keep track on all my digital notes.

I have a tab that is directly related to my book where I keep notes on characters, plot developments etc. Then I have different tabs for articles, how to build plots, writing exercises etc. I can open and close any of these tabs if I need to.

But what to do with all my handwritten notes? Magazine clippings? Index cards? Should I photograph them? Scan them? Keep them separate? Just stash them in a folder and pray that I find what I need when I need it?