IWSG - July 3, 2024

 

    Well.  Imaginative title, no?

    *cough*

    Anyway.

    I don't really have much to say, since my writing life is still in a bit of a lull (all the more so now that I have a pinched nerve in my shoulder and can't really do anything without pain), so I'll just answer the monthly question:

July 3 question - What are your favorite writing processing (e.g. Word, Scrivener, yWriter, Dabble), writing apps, software, and tools? Why do you recommend them? And which one is your all time favorite that you cannot live without and use daily or at least whenever you write?

    I don't know if "favorite" applies as such, but I typically use Microsoft Word, just because it's what I'm used to.  Once, years ago, I tried downloading the demo for Scrivener, since NaNoWriMo always gave out half-off coupon codes for it to winners, but at that time I was put off by the always online nature of it, and it was also too complicated at a first glance.  I might not be as bothered by the latter now, and I'm definitely used to the former by now (though I still prefer the offline nature of Word over anything that's always connecting to the 'net) so who knows what I might think if I tried it again.

    I also use Google Docs pretty heavily because that way I can write on my phone but still have access to it on my computer.  (There are probably ways to do that with Word, but that would likely either not be possible with a phone as old as mine (I am now almost a full 10 versions of iPhone behind the current model) and/or would require the subscription-model Word, whereas I have the one-time-purchase-in-exchange-for-no-updates-model of Word.)  Sometimes if I'm writing a short, simple VN I might write directly into Ren'py, and in the past I've written in TWINE to make use of its easy branching feature, but mostly it's either Word or Google Docs.

    I've heard good things about Obsidian, though.  Keep meaning to look into it, but haven't gotten around to it yet.

    As to "why do you recommend them"...I'm not sure I'd say that I do recommend them, just that I use them.  My use of Word is pretty no-frills; almost anything that can accept text could do the same things.  I use it because I'm used to it.  I don't know that any of its features are especially outstanding, unique or even necessarily worth the cost of the program.  On the free end of the spectrum, Google Docs is convenient, but I've heard horror stories about people losing all their work because something happened to cause Google to delete their account, and I've also heard that they feed documents from Google Docs into AI training programs, so that's horrible.  (The plus side to that is that if they feed my docs into an AI training program, they'll be shooting themselves in the foot:  Half my files in Google Docs are just my nebulous, random, sprawling thoughts, complete with messy counter-thoughts inserted in brackets in the middle of a sentence, as well as words or entire passages that are in strikethrough in the middle of paragraphs or sentences, leaving things that an AI would treat as, for example, a sentence with two verbs back to back, because it wouldn't recognize that one of them was struck out because I picked a new word I liked better but didn't want to delete the old one yet.  There are also quite a few that are half or more in Ren'py code, a lot of them that have Chinese words inserted into them willy-nilly because they're Mo Dao Zu Shi fan fiction, and so on.  There's even one that has both Ren'py code and Chinese words all over the place, being the partial script of a fan game. 🤣)

    I don't think I'd say any of them are my "all time favorite" or that I "cannot live without," but I do use Word pretty much every day that I'm planning to do any writing.