.: Five Cats and a Boy :.

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BOOK ORGANIZATION

Books are organized into 'Story Overview' and Days 1 through Day 30. 'Story Overview' is where you can leave brainstorming notes for yourself, or map out how you want the plot to proceed over the 30 days (see '30 day writing template' in the next section).

STARTING YOUR BOOK

Use 'File->New Book' to create your book. This is where you pick a working title, your 30 day word count goal, and a 30 day writing template. The 30 day writing templates are generic templates that can customized in your 'Story Overview' to prompt you each time you start a new day. This helps to pace your writing and keep on-track with your plot. Feel free to customize it to your story. If day 6 is 'The Hero returns home defeated' you can replace that with 'Peter returns home and broods about losing the game. His parents yell at him for not taking out that trash. He discovers that his little brother hacked his myspace account and is using it to send embarrassing messages to a girl Peter likes. His cat vomited on his pillow." Your 30 day template is at the bottom of the 'Story Overview'. They are optional -- if you don't want to use a template, just remove it from the bottom of your 'Story Overview' and it will stop providing you with a prompt each time you start a new day.

FOCUSING ON COMPLETING 30 DAYS

Days are kept separate, so you can concentrate on upping your word count, not editing or re-arranging what you have already written. If you decide to change your main character's name on day 4, just leave yourself a note to do it during editing, don't stop moving your story forward by going back and making edits. Only when you finish your 30 days are you able to automatically merge your days into a single first draft document using File->Save As.

VIEWING PROGRESS

You can view previous days, or today's progress or your total progress with the Word Count / Day Navigator dialog. You can view that by pressing Ctrl-G, or by selecting it from the Tools menu.

HOW TO START A NEW DAY

Each time you start 'Novel in 30 Days' it will ask you if you want to continue with the last day you worked on or if you want to start on the next day.

WRITING FEEDBACK

The status bar at the bottom of the screen provides some feedback on the number of words you have written in the last minute and so far today. If also provides the approximate Flesch-Kincaid Readability and Grade Level score (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch-Kincaid_Readability_Test if you desire more information).

IMAGE INSPIRATION

Adding background images can help keep you focused and inspire creativity. You can add them using the View menu. If you need to adjust/darken/resize images, you can download a free Windows image editor from http://www.getpaint.net.

FONTS AND COLORS

Fonts and colors can be changed on the Edit menu.

FEATURES MISSING BY-DESIGN

Where is search and replace? It sounds like you want to edit instead of write. There will be time to edit later... Search, replace and spell-check are not included on purpose.

FILL THE PAGE QUICKER

Modify page width: perhaps filling a screen with writing is intimidating and nagging at you. Switch to 1/6th page view to write in a narrower column that is more representative of the width of a paperback novel page (depending on your screen resolution). You can switch viewing widths from the View menu.

SILENCE THE INNER CRITIC

Too critical of what you write as you are typing it out? Let your fingers type the story and leave your eyes out of it by selecting 'Silence the Inner Critic' from the Edit menu. This prints the text in a very light color so it's harder to get fixated or critical of it while typing. Select it a second time to toggle the colors back.

MAKING NOTES TO YOURSELF WITHOUT CHEATING ON YOUR WORD COUNT

You can leave yourself author notes in your text by using brackets [like this]. Words within brackets are not added to the daily or total word counts.

WHERE IS MY DATA? I DON'T WANT TO BE LOCKED INTO USING THIS PROGRAM...

The 'Story Overview' and days 1 through 30 are stored in individual RTF (Rich Text Format) files that can also be read by most word processing programs. These files are saved in your application data directory. You do not need to know this to use 'Novel in 30 Days', BUT if you ever need or want to access them directly the easiest way to find them is to (1) open the book, (2) use 'View->Open Image Folder' to launch Windows Explorer, and then (3) navigate up one directory to find your RTF files.