Hope you had a great Easter,
Passover, or Spring Celebration!

Remember last week when I blogged about making a schedule? Well, even though I haven't been writing every day, I've been getting a good amount done, all things considered. While not the long, unbroken stretches of writing time I usually like, I dedicated the following time last week to writing:

Three lunch breaks (ah-ah-ah...)
Two evenings during the week
A few hours on Saturday night, after coming home from Rosemary's bridal shower.

I'm not sure what the total word-count was, but it definitely feels like I've written more than I was managing before. Although I miss lunch with Raven, she doesn't get hungry as early as I do, and I do manage to get work done in that time frame.

Also, I find that writing at lunch gets me jazzed to go home and continue writing, so I'm more likely to ignore how tired I am when there's a scene I really want to continue working on. I tend to use three different programs when I write: Word, Scrivener, and Yarny.

When I'm not at home, or haven't brought my computer with me, I like to use Yarny. It's a cloud-based word processor with lots of great features like sharing, timeline writing (so you can revert to a previous version of the same document if you make a change you don't like), tags, and a really nice sorting method. It also saves automatically every few seconds, so you don't have to worry about losing your stuff. I started out with the free version, and ended up liking it so much, I shelled out ten bucks for the premium.

It's nice not to have to worry about transferring my writing between computers or from phone to email to word processor, so I highly recommend this website to folks who do a lot of writing at lunch or on the go. Below, I've provided a basic run-down of some of it's most useful features.

HOW YARNY WORKS

Organization

See that little box on the top center? I click on the title and it comes down, showing me which folder I'm in. On the left, you can see which "snippets" are in that folder. These snippets can be organized within their own folders, as you can see in the drop-down with all the colored files.

Colored files? Oh yes. That's another feature, though I can't quite remember if that's a premium feature or not. I used it to quickly identify which scene was which, though I imagine in the future I will use it to distinguish POVs (when I'm writing a multiple POV story again).

Tags and Timeline

Below the document, you can see a little tag icon that lets you, duh, add tags. Next to it is a little clock--when you click on the clock, it brings up a slider, which lets you scroll to previous versions of the document. This is useful when you swap back and forth between writing on the computer and writing on the iPhone app (premium only). I accidentally opened the iPhone app with a previous version of the document I was working on, and it auto-saved, overwriting about a thousand words of writing. I opened the computer version, scrolled back to the previous save, and didn't lose a thing. Genius.

iPhone App

I've purchased an upgraded account on Yarny, since you have to be a premium member to get the iPhone app, which I love, since I can write when I'm standing in line at the supermarket, or waiting in front of the microwave at lunch time, or stuck somewhere without a pen (my nightmare), and not have to compile from three different places or struggle to remember where I was.