Lost in Munchkin Land

This morning I woke up feeling like one of the survivors on “Lost.” The past two days were spent watching the munchkins while their parents worked on the new house. Yesterday I had a 3 year old, a 2.5 year old and a 9 month old.

Nobody was interested in a nap but me. The majority won. We played Wizard of Oz, went for a walk, watched SpongeBob SquarePants, read books and blew lots and lots of bubbles. Needless to say there was no writing going on at Camp Swampy home base.

We had a blast but never did I feel more like a baby boomer. There’s a reason why a woman’s fertility starts going downhill after thirty.

Eventually the babies went home, the house was put back in order and I sat down at the computer at 7 PM. I skimmed through 116 emails and started playing with the demo version of a program I downloaded a few days ago.

"WriteItNow" by Ravenshead Services is a software program that will help you write and organize your novel. It’s user friendly with tabs at the top and a tree view on the left. The help is well documented and there are plenty of extras.

It comes with a short story that illustrates the various features. I chose to use a story idea of my own and start from scratch although I wasn’t able to save anything.

I started with the “Characters” and added a few descriptions. You can even generate new characters and names when you get stuck. There are tabs for Locations, Events, Ideas, Chapters, Notes, Charts and Submissions. "WriteItNow" has a thesaurus, spell checker, word count and exports your work in plain text, RTF or HTML. The full version contains more add-ons and allows you to save your work.

I previously wrote about yWriter which is free. At $49.95 for the download or $59.95 for the CD WriteItNow is a reasonably priced alternative if you want the extra features.