Blank Pages

So earlier this week, Matt McCabe ran a week-long smart phone event as a warm-up for Nanowrimo. The premise was simple: Write as much as you can on your phone for the entire week and report your numbers at the end of the day. I started out pretty hard and ended up third; I didn’t write on Saturday as I was out shopping with family in Thailand and Sunday was spent being carsick. XD

The contest did, however, help me learn about some new and interesting tools for smartphones.

If you’re on iOS and you use dropbox, you might want to have a look at Plaintext. It’s a minimalist editor that lets you write and sync your notes to dropbox; a useful feature if you don’t have always-on Internet connection on your mobile device. And if you don’t have a dropbox account, sign up now (this is my dropbox referral link, by the way). I love dropbox, and I think it’s one of the best ways to carry your writing around no matter where you go.

For Android users, there is also Epistle. It’s basically the Android version of Plaintext, and it comes with dropbox integration again. It’s free and very minimalist.

As you can guess though, I’m not using any of these.

I’m using Springpad instead, which is a very powerful note-taking tool. It will run offline if it detects there is no Internet connection (which was what I experienced in Thailand) and gave me a quick and easy way to write my story in a daily format. So I organised my chapters by day and then imported them into my Google Docs file once I was on the computer. Is it a bit cumbersome? Yup. Was it easy? Sure! Was it easier to keep track of? Yes.

I will probably be using Springpad this Nanowrimo to write on the go, with separate notes for different sections, but my primary will still be Google Docs on the office PC, then write on Q10 with the file being backed up to both my secondary hard disk AND Dropbox and when the file gets too big… emailing it to myself.

In case you need to ask, yes I AM one of those people who are PARANOID about losing my novel.

See you on the flip side!

Original entry as appearing at Ink to Screen.