inkstains

contest 68's topic is fall
weekend chat would like to know if you are a procrastinator!

Contest or TnT topic ideas? Please share! We like community topics!

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We've talked about this before, but technology (and inkstains membership!) is always changing; it's nice to feel up-to-date every now and then.

I have both Evernote and Journler on my computer, though I cannot actually even remember the basic point of Journler. (Presumably it was useful at some point? Maybe I should open it up and play with it again and see if I like it still. Delete it if I don't, use it if I do.) I use Evernote to organize my multi-part, long, or otherwise convoluted stories - I have a notebook for each universe, and each notebook contains a timeline, a list of characters, and any completed/posted individual stories from that universe. (One of my universes is about to need some sort of map of, uh, land, and another map of people's relationships to each other.)

But I don't like to keep in-progress pieces in Evernote, because I cannot control the organization within notebooks as well as I would like. (So instead I keep them in folders called "bzuh" and "stuff" with file names like "that one" and "the thing with the wings" as though that counts as better organization.)

What writing programs do you use, if any? How do you keep your various things organized?

Or are you a "short stand-alone stories only!" kind of person who doesn't need such organization?

Contest 65 is open for submissions - where is your horizon?

Join the weekly chat post! This week features sports and dancing and randomness :D

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We all write. We also all eat. Do you do both at the same time? Do you like to write about food, or does your writing (and reading) influence what you eat?

More than once, I've been so enticed by the description of some sort of food in whatever I'm reading that I have to make that for dinner. It's led me to try several new foods that either I hadn't heard of before or hadn't been brave enough to try before a character described how much they enjoyed it. At the same time, I find it's very hard to me to positively describe a food that I don't enjoy, even if my character does.

Contest 53 submissions are open until 5 pm EDT tomorrow - let your character meet a new family member!

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I think it's relatively rare for someone to write entirely for fun. Some people's fiction carries an apparently social message, or a political message, or a moral, or a warning about what could happen if X keeps going the way it currently is. Or maybe it's not a warning - maybe it's "do keep going like this, so Y can can result from X, because that would be very, very cool!"

Are you a person who has one typical message embedded in your stories, or is each story different in what you hope the reader will take from it? What do you want the reader to take from it, and how often do you think that happens?

Contest 47 submissions will close Thursday, May 3, 5 pm EDT (9 pm GMT).

If you're a codemonkey volunteer and you haven't received a PM from me, something has gone terribly wrong! I've only heard back from mythochromos at this point, so if you've contacted me, please do so once again!

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I try so hard not to be a computer snob, but I'm accused of it despite my best efforts. It's just that my computer has a keyboard that I'm rather accustomed to, and if I try to use someone else's keyboard, it just doesn't work. (I also can't text with other phones very well.) I'm a MacBook Pro kid, no matter what you put in front of me, I freely admit to being a pen snob, though. I have one set of pens for writing (Bic Atlantis) and one set of pens for coloring in doodles when I should be writing (Pilot brand). I have a stack of cheap notebooks for classes and reminders that I've probably had for years, and I have a few nicer, more expensive (and smaller, hiking-friendly) notebooks for sitting down and writing. Still, I'd rather type than hand-write almost anything; it's just that I don't carry my computer up mountains.

What are your writing tools?