Hey guys, some major, life-changing things are happening right now. Can’t really go into details until I know more concrete information, but everything’s topsy-turvy this month, haven’t been able to do much writing.

I’m trying to fall back into form but there’s a lot of life-related things to think about, making it next-to-impossible to concentrate.

Trying to keep the momentum from yesterday, I did find that changing the finished text color to white is even better because I can’t see it at all … except for all the annoying squiggly spellcheck and grammarcheck lines. Word seems to think I’m an idiot most of the time.

So I want to propose a new word processor for fantasy writers. Unheard of, right? I know. Anyway, here would be some of the features:

Chapters.
Every time you create a new chapter, it gets added to the table of contents at the beginning of your document. DUH!
You can format it however you want, such as:

CHAPTERNAME … PageNumber

And of course you can toggle whether or not the table of contents is seen or hidden.

Proper Nouns.
Every time you create a new character or some kind of proper noun, instead of the spell check yelling at you until you ‘add it to the dictionary’, you can just treat it as a Proper Noun, just for this project.
And here’s the the coolest feature: Proper Nouns would get linked to your glossary/index at the end of your book and you can modify them and their definitions at any time.
It would be a great writing tool, helping writers keep track of their characters, locations, and who-knows-what-else.

Hidden text.
Collapse a paragraph, chapter, or scene. Make it all go away until you’re ready to view it again. Every coding program in the world lets me collapse/expand code, so why isn’t there a writing program that lets me do it with text?

Chapter emblems/styles.
A simple graphic like a black diamond, or a more complex graphic like a house crest at the beginning of each chapter that doesn’t require you to manually do it every time, along with font styles, numbering, positioning, and whatever else you want.

Big book, small book, digibook.
Templates that easily let you view how your book would look in the typical mass-paperback sizes versus hardback versus how it would look on an e-reader. Also, how would it look as a typed manuscript, all double-spaced, in the proper font, with a title and author page, ready for submittal?

The top corners.
The ability to EASILY control what it says on the top left and top right of pages. Top left? Book title! Top right? Chapter title! Maybe I don’t want the page number to appear on some pages, such as when a new chapter begins. Ever think of that?!? Why oh why isn’t this easy to do?

Toggle Seamless pages on/off.
It’s hard to evaluate things like beats and flow when one-tenth of your paragraphs get split in half by that giant stupid gap between each page.

I could go on and on about my dream word processor, but I’ll stop there. Please, open-source indie developer who might be reading this right now, please make this. I’d pay you, but it would go against your not-for-profit, open-source idealisms.

Well, haven’t written much this month until today. That sucks, but it was partly because I’ve been kept busy at work and partly because I was sick over the weekend. Excuses, I know.

And that’s too bad because on January 31st I was flying high. I had 16 REALLY GOOD writing sessions last month, sessions where I ACTUALLY MADE REAL PROGRESS and I hope to continue that trend.

Knowing I have to write these new scenes to move on is what killed my momentum. I was afraid for some deep-seated reason or another. But, once again, by forcing myself to move on I’ve proved to myself, yet again, that I can do this.

I also started highlighting my finished paragraphs in red. It’s been helping a lot. A mental stop sign pops up and says, ‘Hey! Don’t read this!’

Perfect!