{Content moved to a new page – Outline — which is password protected for now.}

For some reason I spent an inordinate amount of time describing the main character’s apartment. I’m writing a space opera. It’s not important what his bed looks like. Maybe I should kill someone and put the corpse on the bed.

*gnaws fingers*

I went and got accounts on both Yarny and Pangurpad, but you know what? The version of Wordpad that comes with Windows 7 might just end up being what I write in. Both those websites seem to be fine and useful, but I’m still wary of trusting my writing to “the cloud.” It’s not that I’m afraid of people stealing my work; it’s that I’ve lost data so many times before to internet glitches and it seems stupid to me to put everything online only.

I have had complaints about Wordpad ever since the days when Windows 95 replaced Windows 3.1 (yes, I am old), and the quite adequate little word processing program Write.exe was replaced by Wordpad… and no one used it ever again. Well I didn’t. For one thing, Wordpad did not have any way that I could figure out of paginating, and pagination is important to me as someone who likes to eventually print out her stuff. Being able to put page numbers automatically into a document is just about the only reason I had for using word processing bloatware like Microsoft Office. But I got this new computer and guess what I found out: you can set up pagination in the print setup! The page setup dialogue box gives you a simple checkbox. (Does happy dance.)

Another thing the program does now is it lets you change the line spacing. This is also good for someone who needs to write a manuscript. I learned to type back in the (cough, wheeze) days of typewriters, where we were taught that proper manuscripts must be double-spaced. I was programmed by this early teaching and could not get used to not having that capability. Write.exe let me change the line spacing, but it came out in the days when word-processing software was primitive and imitative of typewritten manuscripts. It might not be considered necessary any more unless you’re sending a printed manuscript to an old-fashioned publisher, but it’s nice to have the option.

Wordpad is still pretty barebones (you can’t do fancy things like put in footnotes or columns, for example), so it’s not much use for business people I guess. It’s perfect, though, for someone just writing a story or novel, unless you’re writing one with fancy text layout tricks like House of Leaves (which I haven’t read, only heard about). And it comes with Windows 7 so you don’t even have to find it or download it.

I’m also probably going to use my old laptop to do some writing for days when I don’t want to sit at the desk. That machine runs Ubuntu and I have my choice of text editors to use on that one. None of them are perfect but Pyword is a good barebones text editor and Abiword is a good word processor that doesn’t have OpenOffice’s bloat. Or I can plug my ethernet cord in and get on the internet and use Yarny or something. I have to do that anyway; I haven’t gotten on the thing since I got the new desktop so I need to test it.

Okay enough. Back to trying to wrestle my “new” story idea into shape for midnight Monday. (Don’t worry, I’m mostly doing this in my head. I promise I haven’t started writing it yet!)