Being Peta

My trolling the net has lead me to rwo pieces of interesting software which I'm going to trial to help me build the stories. 

One is called 'Ywriter' which is a way to break down the story into it's charcater, plot, chapter, scene components.  It's got lots of versatility and an intelligent organisational system.  Google it, it's a tiny download and easy to install, and then jump onto Youtube for a tutorial.  that's all i did to get started with it.  It also seems to have a very comprehensive built in set of instructions..  Going to give it a thourough test run tomorrow with a dummy project after I've done the house cleaning.  I'll let you know how it went.

The second which I've been having fun with for the past hour is a program called 'Freemind', which is basically a fairly straightforward mind mapping software to explore ideas with in a fluid enviroment... it is EXACTLY what i do on paper when I'm planning a story.  Once again I found the download through googling, then Youtubed to find a tutorial.  (After a string of night shifts I need to see and hear and not just read the instructions to learn.)  I've played around with a dummy mindmap on it and had a ball.  my advice is just screw around with it for a couple of hours, it's really quite powerful.

Both of these apps are FREEWARE.

I'm going to do a dummy run of planning a short story on Freemind and then using Ywriter to expand it into a full fledged writing plan.  You can use Ywriter as a word processor and write the whole thing on it, but I'll see how I go.