05.Jan.2009 Can’t Sleep

It was a horrible, horrible night for me yesterday.

I couldn’t sleep, no matter what I did. It drove me nuts and now I’m bleary eyed and I’m quite certain that my eyelids are going to shrivel up and die on me just when I need them most. *yawns* I got a lot of thinking done, though.

And writing, during the weekend. It all started with a small idea, but then grew into an entirely different kind. It’s kinda odd, seeing how the plot was charted out. I’m calling it ‘Just Us’, for the moment, based on a song that I really like a lot. The song’s the same name, Just Us, by Mia Rose.

I still find it really weird how the story practically wrote itself. Well, the bare minimums, at least. Coming up with the idea is fine. And now I have scenes and chapters to expand on and it’s kinda… freaking me out.

Over the weekend I also tried a couple of new programs, like OneNote and yWriter. Ok, so I’m a Mac user, but I’m darn glad that I installed Windows on my poor Macbook, because it allows me to use those particular programs. OneNote was the spark that led to my current affair with JU (Just Us – I’m going to be talking a lot about it for the next few weeks, at least and I’m lazy and I refuse to type out the extra letters and you can’t do anything about it. =P)

I usually dislike intensely anything to do with Windows, seeing how I have to patch up the older computer with all sorts of stuff as bugs just infest it. (I’m the IT girl/repair girl/know-it-all in the house. Sucks for me.) The new computer’s juuuust lovely. The screen is huge, and it has great speakers for when playing Audi! But I digress.

OneNote is like a digital notebook that MS created. The idea is that you can collect/store (?) information like the way you do in a notebook, only digitally. So you can have multiple notebooks, with section dividers, and pages in each section. Also, you can click anywhere and just start typing, just like a notebook. There’s other stuff too (like password-locking sections), but basically: it’s a digital notebook.

As you can see, I have visual inspiration to keep me inspired to write. You’re lucky you’re seeing these mild ones… I used to have *AHEM* a picture of a very HOT D.R. gracing that current page. All very drool worthy, I assure you.

The other program I used is yWriter. I remember stumbling across it as I looked for an e-book reader, and a recent brush with the site made me check out the other programs available on the site there. And there I found… yWriter. *cue heavenly angels singing*

It’s a note: FREE!!! program that helps to break down your story into little pieces so you can make sense of it. That’s if you’ve managed to get the entire story down, usually in Word. And I know (I can’t say for you) how freaking hard it is to expand on certain scenes. I start to write and then lose track or the file gets so huge that it lags when I scroll up and down. To quote a classmate, it’s “irri-noying”.

So, the beauty of it is that in your project (story), you can create multiple chapters and as you work in one chapter, edit it and fill it with scenes and stuff. There’s a daily word count target (if you’re those people who love breaking targets), a dictionary (but you gotta install it) and back up stuff. It’s nice too ’cause it has stuff like Characters, Locations, and even Items. I’m not too sure what Items is for, but I think it might be useful if you were working with magical items, etc. and need to keep track of where it’s been. I guess.

What’s also really cool is that there is a storyboard feature in it! You can move the scenes around on the different characters and stuff.

And so… All I have to do now is break my little story into pieces and then work on them.

Question is, which one do I work on first?