Wednesday, August 26, 2009

A bit more about One Note and the writing process

As Anne McAllister mentioned she hadn't used it...
One Note is the notebook programme for Microsoft Office. You can find it in the Office tools if it is not immediately visible.
Like all Microsoft products, there is a tutorial and it is really designed for corporate team work.
You can even create a shared notebook -- one where people edit at the same time and all shared notebooks are updated. This might be a good application if authors are working on a continuity for example, as then the Bible of the series is quickly updated. You can even do it as a live sharing session. Just do not ask me how to do it. It is in the tutorial!
I have not done a continuity -- they sound like hard work, but I do have to create bibles for my linked books, rather than just relying on memory. A shared notebook as well as linked notebooks has a certain appeal.
You can also create notebooks for different books, create tables, and etc. Everything is importable to Word. You can paste pictures, draw and have a variety of different notes. You can also capture webpages, clip pictures etc. SO if you wanted to make a virtual collage, you could do it. You can do lasso select to draw over pictures, and it does have a text recognition feature.
You could create a notebook for each story, plus have a master notebook for the series. In some ways the storage system for notebooks is better than creating word files as you can have tabs etc.
But like anything, it is just a tool and the main thing is to write the story.
Anyway, I suspect I shall use it.

Yesterday, my lovely editor sent through my cover for The Viking's Captive Princess. It is wonderful and I think the lovely Judy York who did the cover Taken by the Viking and A Noble Captive also did this cover. I hadn't realised until yesterday that she did ANC. Personally I think the inside front cover of ANC deserves its own front cover!
However, the VCP cover is not a jpeg and I can't post it. As soon as I get a jpeg, I will post as it is one of my favourite covers. And yes, I know I have to do the excerpt as well...
Please bear with me on this. It is called admin. And yes, I am a tad overexcited, but the cover has a great feel about it, much better than VWUW.

My youngest is better and no longer as pale. The whole BRaTY thing seems to have worked. He did refuse the rice though.

Right back to writing this book. It is the first of a trilogy so you can see why I thinking about bibles and shared notebooks as I want the continuity there. Had I had such things with the Viken trilogy, certain things might not have taken so long...Live and learn.
But I am so pleased that Isabel Swift shared her insight gained from being Nora's editor!

2 comments:

Lacey Devlin said...

It's great to hear the danger has passed. It won't be long before the youngest is zooming around again :P

Kate Hardy said...

Glad your littlest is better.

Hmm - may have to take a look at One Note.

I just wish Microsoft had a programme as good as Lotus Organizer... (Yup, I ended up putting my Lotus software on the new PC!)