Spacejock Software has released a new version of their novel-writing software yWriter. Written by a writer for writers, yWriter is a great little tool for organizing novels in progress — and just about any other long manuscript.

yWriter allows you to create a book project, add chapters, scenes within chapters, and character profiles — assembling the manuscript from these pieces at the end. You can track locations, items, and viewpoints; set and keep track of daily word count goals; and import scenes from other programs saved in Rich Text Format (useful if you write on a Palm or other mobile platform, so you can add the work easily when you get home).

Best of all, yWriter is free (as are other Spacejock Software products, including several good ones for writers).

yWriter (Free)

The good news is, if you can get to a computer, you can write.

There are several good online word processors that you can access from any computer with a web browser, regardless of whether it’s a Mac, a PC, even a Linux computer. These services can also act as an online backup for your work, keeping everything you’re working on and have worked on available in a centralized place.

My favorite, by far, is Adobe’s Buzzword. The flash-based interface is gorgeous and easy to use, and it offers a number of little bells-and-whistles that are useful for writers, such as a running word count, an active revision history, and the ability to share documents with collaborators.

Buzzword is a fairly new arrival on the web-based application scene, which means there’s a lot more to come. For example, Adobe is promising better font support (right now, you’re limited to using the handful of oddball fonts Adobe has provided — granted, they’re beautiful, as you’d expect from the people that brought us on-screen fonts for computers). At the moment, you can save as Word .doc, HTML, and the effectively universal Rich Text Format; Adobe says PDF support is on its way.

I use Buzzword for just about all my writing, even when I’m at home. I like it so much that I started writing a book, just so I could play with it! When I was planning this site, I wrote almost a hundred posts in advance using Buzzword. That way, I could log in and add new posts whenever and wherever I felt like — even though the site itself wasn’t built yet. (If you click through to the large version of the screenshot, you’ll see I even use it for writing HTML code!)

Bonus tip: Hit F11 on your keyboard to put your browser into full-screen mode while using Buzzword.

Buzzword (free)