October Novel Prep Challenge

If you’re willing to fork out a little dough, here are some suggestions on where to spend it.



If you buy nothing else for NaNo this year, you need to get this book. It was written by one of the founders of NaNo, and the advice for completing NaNo in it is invaluable. The book is broken up into two parts: Before November, and during November. In the during part, each chapter is to be read the week they’re writing about. It provides tips, warnings, and cheerleading for each week of the month. The book is roughly 50 thousand words, so it’s not too long and it’ll give you a hint of the length of what you’re writing next month.



This program is the Rolls Royce of writing programs. If you’re the type of person that likes to control every aspect of everything, this is a great program for you. I haven’t had time to get to know this program well, but I’ve heard a lot of good things about it. Here’s a little intro about the program if you’re interested.







If you want a writing program with an awesome character development aspect, this is the one you’ll want to take a closer look at. You can link characters together, show relationships, change the color of their tags, show male or female in the name tag, and develop personality traits for each character in the program. It’s all kinds of awesome.





If you don’t want to open your wallet for one of the two programs above, this is a spiffy writing program designed by a published author who’s also a programmer. That means it was designed with the writer in mind. I haven’t had a chance to mess with this one too much yet, but I think I’m going to take it for a test run to hold my outline. I heard about yWriter in an earlier thread on October NaNo Prep and wanted to add it here as an option.



F.Y.I – Taking on a new writing system in the middle of the fire of November might not be the sanest of ideas. Then again, writing a novel in a month isn’t the height of sanity either, so if any of you are like me and want to go whole hog, take a peak and see if any of these programs might work for you!