As mentioned yesterday, I’m going to attempt to finish my novel Road Closed, which sits at around 83,000 words, 20 or so chapters and is an unfinished mess.
Every day I will update what I’ve done, even if it’s nothing. The initial updates will be a bit more than nothing, but mostly about planning and organization, two things I can be very bad at.
It’s going to be fun.
My first task is to choose what tool to write with. As I haven’t written fiction in quite a while, I don’t have a go-to piece of software, but I’ve narrowed it down to a few options:
- Obsidian, with one or more novel-writing plugins added. The main appeal here is it’s all local and in plaintext/Markdown, so can be easily moved elsewhere if needed.
- NEO. Not to be confused with the character from The Matrix. This is newer software specifically for novel and screenwriters, created and available for free by Hugh Howey, author of Wool. This is also local, though it makes the interesting choice to keep your files in HTML format. Still reasonably portable with an export function built-in. The one downside is it’s partly vibe-coded, though apparently that’s restricted to just the optional Cover Art generation.
I’ve imported the book into NEO and it looks pretty good for an 83,00 word mess! But that’s about all I’ve done so far.
Tomorrow…more. Presumably.