Panning for Gold

I am nine days and over 16K words into NaNoWriMo 2019. I am going to end up with a 100 page (single-spaced) Word document that will be a hodgepodge of disjointed novel narrative (ha!) and book planning.

Digging through this mess at the end will be a grim and painful task. So much so that, despite good intentions, I might never get back to it. What a waste.

Cue the Lean Six Sigma existential crisis.

Waste is my sworn enemy. There has to be a way to work smarter than this:

And it looks like there is a better way!

Wavemaker

My dear husband forwarded me an episode of his favorite podcast, Erasable, in which the hosts were talking about how they approach NaNoWriMo. Here I learned about what looks to be the tool for the job.

Wavemaker is a free application for writing and planning. It provides a selection of planning tools, such as timelines and mind maps, that link directly to their relevant sections of prose. The associations can be easily switched around through dragging and dropping.

As this tool is very visual, it will be most useful to show you some quick videos about it.

Wavemaker FAQs

• Created and freely shared by Iain Wood.  If you like it, consider supporting him on Patreon!
• Will work on almost any device. Cross-platform.
• Syncs up to Google Drive.
• In Iain’s words, “Wavemaker is a PWA (Progressive Web App), which at it’s most basic level is a website that you can install locally and run without an internet connection.” Iain recommends that you use it with Google Chrome, but expects that over time, additional browsers will work too.
• Wavemaker privacy policy.
• This is not a robust tool for editing.  Do your edits in a word processor.