Q10
November 1, 2007
The first day of NaNoWriMo is finally here. I started writing after midnight, before I went to bed last night, and I’m just sitting down to continue now. I’m a little late getting home, as I went to the climbing gym tonight.
I’m using the free Q10 as my word processor for this month. It was recommended to me by Amanda (her fiance, actually), and it’s really working for me. It’s a very simplistic text editor that has a few handy features:
- No installation required. It’s run from a self-contained executable, so you can toss it on a memory stick with your novel and take it anywhere.
- Run at full screen, allowing you to focus on your writing free of distractions.
- Set a word count target. You can set it for your month or your day goal, and it will display the percentage completed at the bottom of the screen.
- Set a timer. This is one of my favourite features. Once the time is up, it will display how many words you wrote during that period. I plan to set it for 30 minute intervals, to remind myself to stop and stretch every now and then. Having a timer while you write tends to keep you moving at a fast pace.
- Auto-save the document at a customizable interval.
- No distracting red and blue lines under your mistakes that will awaken your inner editor.
- Display multiple word counts. I use one for overall word count and one for daily word count.
- Insert notes into the document. By started a line with “..”, it sets that line as a note. You can bring up the list of existing notes whenever you like. This will be really useful when you go back to edit next month. The notes do not count towards your word count.
Just thought I’d share this with you. I’m off to write now!
Q10 looks good. Thanks for sharing.
I’m using Word 2007 at work and Open Office writer at home. It’s working for me so far. The feature I really like is the auto table of contents, which I learned from caveblogem.
Comment by strugglingwriter — November 2, 2007 @ 5:18 am
Glad that you’re enjoying Q10, thus far. Didn’t know about the notes thing, though, so thanks for teaching me somethin’ new!
Comment by Amanda — November 2, 2007 @ 8:34 am
I usually use Open Office at home, Writer, but I decided to switch to this for novel writing, mainly because of the full screen feature. I’m very easily distracted by shiny objects.
No problem, Manda. It’s handy for marking places that need work. Sort of like all of my “//TODO: This is dirty, dirty, dirty” comments in my Java. :)
Comment by Rob — November 2, 2007 @ 9:56 am
That sounds like a really useful program - almost as if it were specially designed for NaNoWriMo writers! Good luck with the rest of your WriMo-ing :)
Comment by Soph — November 2, 2007 @ 11:27 am
Rob, I work in Vb .Net and was debugging something and had a bunch of “hello” write statements on a web page. Sure enough I moved it into production and the world was able to see my blunder before I caught it an hour later. Ugh!
Comment by strugglingwriter — November 2, 2007 @ 1:06 pm
Sounds like a handy bit of stuff there. Hope the writing is going well and that the story is starting to flow.
Comment by Absolute Vanilla (and Atyllah) — November 3, 2007 @ 9:36 am
Thanks Soph! They actually mention NaNoWriMo on their webpage, so it’s very possibly they had this in mind while developing it.
Ouch, Writer. That’s always embarrassing when something like that happens. Luckily, as a Java developer, my accidental debug statements only end up in the log file. :)
Thanks, Vanilla. It’s started to flow quite well, actually.
Comment by Rob — November 3, 2007 @ 4:12 pm