Jeremiah Tolbert

As a designer, I’m always stum­bling across use­ful resources and tools online, but for what­ever rea­son, I find fewer tools that really exist to help make writ­ers’ lives eas­ier.  That doesn’t mean they aren’t out there.  It just means you have to dig a lit­tle deeper.  Today, I thought I would share some tools that can make cer­tain aspects of the writer’s life a tad easier.

1. Dropbox

If you’re any­thing like me, you don’t always remem­ber to run your back­ups.  With recent com­puter trou­bles, I’ve been mak­ing a much big­ger effort to back­ing up every­thing of impor­tance.  About six months ago, I started using Dropbox and I haven’t looked back.

Dropbox is an online ver­sion­ing and backup sys­tem.  You install drop­box on your win­dows or mac com­puter and every­thing in the folder called “My Dropbox” is con­stantly uploaded to the server.  When you make mod­i­fi­ca­tions, it keeps a record of these changes and you can go to the web inter­face and load older ver­sions.  Accidentally over­write a file?  Dropbox can save your butt.  It has saved me on more than one ocassion.

Even bet­ter, Dropbox can be installed on mul­ti­ple com­put­ers, keep­ing your drop­box folder synced up to all of the machines.  Whether you’re on your office com­puter or your lap­top, you will have access to your files.

Finally, Dropbox users can share fold­ers with one another.  We use this fea­ture exten­sively at Escape Artists to deal with our pro­duc­tion files, con­tracts, and var­i­ous busi­ness doc­u­ments and resources.

My biggest con­cern when I first started using Dropbox was that it would con­stantly be upload­ing my 50+ megabyte pho­to­shop files, and my band­width would be devoured.  It actu­ally tracks the dif­fer­ences, though, and only uploads the changed bits.  I’ve never noticed Dropbox being a hog of my writing.

There’s a free 2 giga­byte account, which should be more than enough to pro­tect your writ­ing doc­u­ments.   I pay for the 50/​gb a year plan for $99 per year because I truck in larger files.    Dropbox is avail­able for Mac, PC, and Linux.

2. Evernote

I work across 3 dif­fer­ent com­put­ers, and keep­ing my research notes in an easy-​​to-​​access for­mat, while main­tain­ing flex­i­b­lity and a vari­ety of for­mats, isn’t easy.  That is, until I dis­cov­ered Evernote.  What I was look­ing for orig­i­nally was pro­duc­tiv­ity soft­ware to help myself imple­ment the GTD method.  What I found instead was a very use­ful pro­gram for orga­niz­ing all those lit­tle bits and pieces of things that I need to access from time to time.

Evernote works on a very sim­ple sys­tem of note­books and notes.  You can add tags, and just about any kind of media into a note.  You can clip entire web­pages into a note, or just the URL.  You can make screen cap­tures very eas­ily.  And then the real power is, it’s con­stantly back­ing up your notes to the server, and sync­ing them with all machines you run it on.  There’s a usage limit for free accounts based on data trans­fer, but I’ve never even got­ten halfway there.  I don’t tend to use much in the way of mul­ti­me­dia files though.

Not only do I use Evernote for sort­ing and keep­ing track of things like research notes, sto­rynotes, and so on–I often start writ­ing my blog­posts there.  Any kind of doc­u­ment where the for­mat isn’t nec­es­sary, that I want to be able to access from any­where.  You can even record voice notes with the iPhone app and they will be synced to all your machines.  I used this fea­ture to take down some notes on my novel project while I was dri­ving across Kansas alone.  Very use­ful feature.

There are a few things about Evernote I do find lack­ing.  For one, you can’t sort note­books into col­lapsi­ble hier­ar­chies.  I would really like to be orga­nize my notes in a sim­i­lar fash­ion to my email pro­gram.   You can kind of fake this with saved searches for tags and so on, but I don’t really need a more detailed sys­tem of orga­ni­za­tion than notebooks/​folders.

Evernote is avail­able on Mac, PC, and iPhone. It has a very nice web-​​based inter­face as well.  If you have an inter­net con­nec­tion, you can get to your notes.

3. Sonar

I don’t use this one cur­rently, but not because there’s any­thing wrong with it.  I just don’t have enough sto­ries and sub­mis­sions out that I need to keep track of any­thing.  Sonar is a PC-​​only data­base specif­i­cally designed for keep­ing track of your sub­mis­sions.  It’s genre agnos­tic, as far as I remember.

Some fea­tures include:

• color-​​coding
• list subs by the work or by market
• sortable
• auto­matic daily backups
• Until the per­fect online solu­tion comes along, Sonar is my pick for track­ing submissions.

When I start writ­ing and sub­mit­ting more actively again, you can bet that Sonar will be my go-​​to track­ing software.

4. Bubbl​.us

Bubbl​.us is a mind-​​mapping web­site.  It has a slick, easy to use inter­face, and you can export your maps out in a vari­ety of image for­mats or even HTML.

My pri­mary use of Bubbl​.us is to cre­ate site maps for free­lance web­site gigs.  However, I do use it from time to time to explore var­i­ous notions in a work in progress story.  I find that the mindmap­ping method really helps me brain­storm when I’m work­ing on things like world­build­ing or plot.

Being browser-​​based, it’s cross-​​platform, and it’s free!  It’s hard to beat that.