Erick Behymer wrote for us The Djinn Chronicles. Now he is back with the review of MyNovel. MyNovel is a novel writing software. It contains a complete word processor and will get you to think about and plan your characters, settings, and the events that will form the skeleton of your novel. But let’s read Erick review about this unique software.
A software that helps you to be a novelist
Rarely when testing software (mostly security related stuff), am I impressed by anything. I will spend hours picking apart a program, attempting to find any flaw or blemish, major or minor. When I was first approached to test MyNovel, I donned my glasses of pessimism expecting the worst. This is not meant as a detractment, it’s just something I do.
At a quick glance, MyNovel appears to be a standard word processing application, however, there are several major differences/enhancements. The first, and most striking is the ability to create a story template. At any point, you can change the details of your novel, add diagrams, events, characters, places, objects and even check progress/completion.
There’s even an “inspiration” option readily available. Specifically, the character and place generators are rather impressive, as you can choose between various name types. If that weren’t enough, you can choose and/or customize a color scheme.
Once you’re finished with your MyNovel project, there is a fairly comprehensive list of publishers available to choose from, along with relevant contact information and requirements. This takes a lot of the hassle of looking for a book publisher using a search engine.
All of these features are put together in an easy-to-use-easy-to-remember interface. MyNovel’s tools are put right at your fingertips, so there’s no endless searching to find what you need. Regardless of whether you’re a novice or a seasoned veteran to writing, I would strongly recommend that you take time to give MyNovel a try.
For the computer savvy, I have compiled a list of observations below:
MyNovel is fairly impressive, and has quite a bit of potential not only in features, but also performance. When idle, the program takes up a less than 3MB of RAM and during the most intensive states, 12-19MB. If that wasn’t impressive enough, it only requires ~25MB of disk space for a full install. Even running MyNovel at full throttle, it remained fairly quick and responsive to user interaction.
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Nice review. Question though. It does not appear to work on a MAc? I have an Apple G5. Where can you review the ls it of publishers you mention? How is that built in? Is it updated? Best Steve
Very interesting. I have heard about similar software in the past. I am interested to check it out and see what formats it will output to and its compatibility with other software I use.
Jason Covington
http://www.jasoncovington.com
From what I can tell, it’s only written for Windows platforms. However, there are virtualization/emulation programs that allow windows applications to be run on other operating systems/configurations and vice versa.
Even though I’m not a fan of Wikipedia, the following pages might be of help.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Virtual_PC
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VMware
Hopefully, that answers a few questions 🙂
For my novel, all I used was blank pieces of paper for all that stuff! Trying to organize a software application takes up too much time.
Of course, I still use the bubble method of brainstorming…
@Deidrea
I do the same thing as well, but the main advantage I find to using things like this program, in addition to text editors is that I don’t have to worry too much about keeping track of the paper I write on. Admittedly I’m a bit absent-minded and get sidetracked easily, so sometimes I wind up misplacing things.
As for the method of where I come up with ideas, usually it comes from chronic nightmares and bizzare dreams.