Another NaNo Ten

Ten Things You Can Have for Free

(The NaNoWriMo edition)

Freeware caution: always scan free downloads of anything for bugs and other threats before dumping the programs into your hard drive.

Need an online story organizer with storage? Hiveword is all that plus 100% free.

Language is a Virus is an amazing site filled with tons of free writing games, prompts, generators, and everything else a scribe might need to inspire some new ideas (or simply blow off some steam.) My favorite time waster is their electronic poetry hub (like a virtual version of Magnetic Poetry.)

To get first and last names for your characters without slogging through a phone book, try this quickie character name generator.

If you need to put together a novel notebook for NaNo, try a virtual freeware version like AM-Notebook or Keynote, or a test dive into a printable guide full of templates and examples with my own Novel Notebook.

Plot a scene out before you write it with my Scene On-Call Worksheet (and for more on how it works, here's the post I wrote about it.)

Scribe is "a free cross-platform note-taking program designed especially with historians in mind. Think of it as the next step in the evolution of traditional 3x5 note cards. Scribe allows you to manage your research notes, quotes, thoughts, contacts, published and archival sources, digital images, outlines, timelines, and glossary entries. You can create, organize, index, search, link, and cross-reference your note and source cards. You can assemble, print, and export bibliographies, copy formatted references to clipboard, and import sources from online catalogs. You can store entire articles, add extended comments on each card in a separate field, and find and highlight a particular word within a note or article. Scribe's uses range from an undergraduate history research seminar to a major archival research project." (OS: Windows, Mac OS X)

If you want a novel plot worksheet that is fast, simple, and only takes 1 page, try my Ten Point Plot Template (and following the template is one I filled out so you can see how it works.)

The End -- Now What? is a free 105 page writing/publishing advice e-book for NaNoWriMo participants from Book Baby, one of the sponsors of NaNoWriMo; download your copy here.

A trick to finding great titles for free: Feed a keyword from your story into the Verse search engine at Bartleby.com, then look through the results to see how poets used your keyword in their work. Often you'll find amazing ideas in the lines of e.e. cummings, Emily Dickinson, John Keats and other passionate versesmiths.

Way of the Cheetah, my how-to writing book, is free for anyone to read, download, print out and share until December 1st.