Tools of the Trade

Not going to lie, this is a pretty short list. Considering Novlr itself takes up a HUGE chunk of the tools that I use to craft stories and it could honestly be its own full series of posts. So i'm going to start this off with everything that is not Novlr.

Tome Writing

I am a HUGE fan of buy once own forever tools and programs. Subscription culture sucks. This one came to me as an ad on one of the social networks. So I went to check it out. I was delightfully surprised.

It was an entire system that works like those <name your self help style here> (Shadow work?) journals. The idea being it forces you to think about what you want to put down and helps you organize that information. The brilliant part is when its over you can export the whole thing as a PDF and you have a reliable base of what you are trying to write.

When you start it up, you are greeted with a quiz that helps you build your toolkit based on the area's that you tell it you feel lacking in. Neat.

From there its just taking the time to sit with it, go through the lessons sections and fill out the information based on each section.

As an ADHD Brain myself. I love this as it organizes not only your thoughts but teaches you at the same time.

Loreteller

Loreteller presents itself as a series of frameworks for systemic writing. One of the things that drew me to it was the character building tools. Tome lets you flesh your characters out to a decent degree. However but, Loreteller lets you really dig into them.

When its over you get some really nice graphs of your characters personalities as well as detailed psychological notes done in a way that is more or less agnostic to the story you are writing.

All of which is good information to have even if you don't really use it.

There is a ton to this tool that I have not really messed with including a new forge system that lets you build characters quicker and also lets you see detailed information about how well two characters would mesh in a story.

Obviously all of this information is meant to help you as an author but at the same time its still up to you... The author to choose who tango's and who sits on the sides... Maybe leaning against the wall. Smoking a cig and cursing their inability to dance...

Mindchuk

Okay this one is interesting. You ever wish you could text to one note or whatever your note taking service is? MindChuk is great for this as you are given a phone number to text when you cant be assed to open a webpage. Any content in the text is shot up to your Mindchuk notes and accessible through the main web application.

Factor in the ability to add #tags to your texts and suddenly you have a fairly powerful way to rapidly record thoughts as they happen. Maybe you found a link you want to reference later. Maybe you just want a private journal system.

All of this is accessible through the web application and its expanded functions in the webapp. Like multiple tags, images and so on.

Authors note: The rest of this post is me going on about Nolvr.

Novlr

Uh... That is all. If you know me. You know I love this platform. I host my website on it. I actively participate in steering the platform toward its future through contributed ideas. (The blog function being one of them)

So It goes without saying that I have a HEAVY bias here.

So what can it do?

I'm actually going to differ to the comparison chart on the website for this one. It explains it better than I can. This being said. Its my choice for ideal software.

The zen level of the the platform itself should get an award. The no AI stance is strong and it works to its favor. Its all about human creativity and giving users the space to work on that. Featuring tools to plan and write your novels that knows how to get out of the way and let you do what you came here to do. Write.