Writing Software?

What's good? I really am hating MS Word right now, and despite my love for emacs, I don't think it will do for this so well. I'd love something designed specifically for books, but I don't know any that run on Windows.

Have I got the software for you!

LyX, using the Memoir class. It's what I use.

http://www.lyx.org/

It is intended mainly as an editor for scientific and similar non-fiction work, but it also works QUITE well for editting novels.

If you want something with more chapter/scene based features, yWriter may be for you. It is also free, and developed by a published author.

http://www.spacejock.com/yWriter4.html

I've used it in the past, and it is quite good as well. It just gives me too many distracting features to play with, so I didn't get as much done.

Hmm... I think that gimmicky is what I'm looking for, so I'll try out yWriter first.

I use Page Four. http://www.softwareforwriting.com/pagefour.html

Lamentably, it's not free, but it is pretty cheap, and you can check it out for free.

What I like about it is that, like yWriter, it lets you keep everything all in one place and organized hierarchically (I don't know why that's different for me than having all my writing stuff in a nice hierarchically organized folder, but somehow it is). It has a richer text editor than yWriter (at least, yWriter v2; not sure how the more recent versions are with that).

If you do go with yWriter, remember that its strengths are in how it lets you organize your story. It's awesome for that.

I just downloaded yWriter.  After a quick run through of it's features, I thought it was more than I needed.  It seems to be an interesting reflection of it's creator's mind.  He's a programmer as well as a writer, and he thinks in that logical, organized way that programmers do.  Not surprising that he would write that way.

Anyway, then I found the word count feature which tells you how many uses you have of each word.  Totally cool!  I sorted by number of uses, and I found some random poetry.  The following words have between 43 and 39 uses in my novel so far:

Asked
Life
Still
Which
Few
Seemed
Right
Nothing
Night
Find
Able
Things
Leave
Something
Ask
Last

Yeah, one of the coolest features I'm seeing in the feature list of PageFour is a phrase finder. It searches word sets and gives you a count of them, which seems nice should you use a certain phrase a lot. I haven't used yWriter enough to know how I like it. I'll finish this novel on it and see on the next time around how I like PageFour.

I'm personally a fan of Open Office as an alternative to Word. It's free if you want to try it out.

http://www.openoffice.org/

For Nanowrimo, however, I like to use Q10. It's a full-screen word processor, so it blocks out a lot of distractions, and it makes typewriter noises. It also keeps track of daily and overall goals, with little notifications on the bottom to tell you how far you've gotten. Not a lot of formatting options (you can only use one font for the entire piece), but all the files are saved as text files so that it's easy to transfer it to another program when you want to do other things with it. Also a free program.

http://www.baara.com/q10/

I see someone beat me to suggesting ywriter.  I love that program so much.  I mean a lot of the stuff I don't use, but some of the other stuff (like the character list) has been so great for quick refrences.

And yWriter automatically scrambles your story to upload to Nano!  Gotta love it!