Image by ClawzCTR via Flickr

One of the things I’ve had the hardest time figuring out since my freelance writing began producing a significant income was how to manage my estimated quarterly tax payments. For the time being, I’ve been over-paying my taxes at my day job and hoping that it was enough to cover the taxes I wasn’t paying on my freelance income. Last year my overpaid taxes just barely covered my freelance taxes – assuming my income keeps climbing at the rate it is (and especially once I start scaling back my day job) this jury-rigged system isn’t going to work for much longer.

Enter Outright, a free online service to help freelancers manage their taxes. Using Outright is fairly simple – you just enter in your income as it comes in, and your expenses as they go out. Around the end of each quarter, Outright sends you a reminder saying your upcoming taxes are about due, and figures them out for you (including Social Security – both employee’s and employer’s contributions) and Medicare). Where several methods exist to figure out your taxes, Outright uses the one that requires the highest payment, on the principle that  its better to overpay a little now and get it back at the end of the text year than to underpay and get hit with fees.

[NOTE: Outright is designed for the US tax system and, as of right now, does not support non-US taxpayers.]

What makes Outright really shine, though, is its integration with other services. On the “income” side, Outright integrates with online bookkeeping system FreshBooks, importing paid invoices every night and updating your tax estimate. On the “expenses” side, you can track receipts using Shoeboxed, an online system that allows you to scan receipts into the system so you can dispose of hard copy (paid versions even allow you to mail your receipts in and have them scanned for you).

Altogether, Outright, FreshBooks, and Shoeboxed create a full accounting system freelancers – particularly at low- and mid-range incomes. Outright scales pretty well, though – as your tax needs get more complex and demand the attention of a bookkeeper or accountant, you can easily give them access – a couple clicks and the system sends an email with a link to set up third-party access to your books.

With a system like this, there’s no longer any excuse to avoid paying your quarterly estimated tax payments. Entry-level versions of FreshBooks and Shoeboxed are free, as is Outright – why not set them all up and give it a try?

Image by lingolook via Flickr

Inspired by Aaron Peter’s posts about the MSI Wind (here and here), I finally gave in and bought a netbook of my own. After much consideration, I decided on the Acer Aspire One, a unit roughly the same physical dimensions and with the same specifications as the MSI Wind but which, to my taste, felt and looked slightly better.

The model I bought came with Windows XP installed, instead of Linux — I have nothing against Linux (and claimed my father’s old PC when he upgraded, which I plan to install Ubuntu on when I get some free time) but I was worried that I’d have a hard time finding drivers for some of my older peripherals (like the scanner I can’t use with my Vista laptop because there are no drivers at all available).

After using it for about a week, I have to say I’m very impressed with my Aspire One. It runs smoothly and quietly, handles Office 2007 well, and of course it’s incredibly portable. Acer thankfully didn’t load it up with a lot of “crapware” (unwanted trials of commercial software) — all I had to do to get up and running was uninstall McAfee’s bloated security suite (replaced with the free AVG) and the 60-day trial of Office 2007 (which I replaced with a full install of Office 2007 Pro).

Working with such a small computer does have its challenges, though. The small screen means you look at everything in smaller bits than you would on a full-size screen, and the small trackpad makes maneuvering around the screen, small as it is, a challenge. But I’ve figured out ways to deal with all the challenges it poses, and the Aspire One has rapidly become my primary machine — I might not write a book on it, but writing my typical 1000-word articles on it has been quite simple, and since I can use it just about anywhere (I haven’t tried the bath yet…) it’s quite comfortable.

Here are some of the tricks I’ve discovered to get the most out of my Aspire One. Most of these should work on just about any XP-based netbook, although some depend on the drivers your manufacturer has installed.

• Auto-hide the taskbar for more screen space. With only about 4 1/2” of screen from top to bottom, you’re going to want as little taking up screen real estate as possible. Getting rid of that 1/3” of taskbar at the bottom doesn’t make much difference on a desktop or 15”+ laptop, but on netbooks it can mean a lot. Right -click anywhere on the taskbar, select “Properties”, and select “Auto-hide the taskbar”. Move the mouse to the bottom edge of the screen and the taskbar will pop back up so you can launch your programs, folders, or Windows functions. When you move the mouse away, the taskbar will slide out of view.
• Install RocketDock. RocketDock is an Apple-style launcher that allows you to launch programs, open folders, and switch windows. I’ve got it set up at the top of my screen with icons for the half-dozen programs I use most as well as my most commonly-used folders. Also, you can have programs minimize to RocketDock instead of the taskbar, which puts a little screenshot of the app in the RocketDock. Since I don’t want to use up more screen space, RocketDock is also set to scroll up and out of the way until I mouse to the top of the screen, at which point it drops down and I can instantly access the programs I need or the windows I’m using. (Free)
• Add function to the desktop. Since the goal of having a netbook is to be more  organized and more productive away from home, it helps to have easy access to a calendar. Smashing Magazine, a website devoted to design, published a variety of desktop wallpapers with monthly calendars every month, so you can add a new, gorgeously designed calendar every month. Take a look at November’s calendar wallpapers for an idea of what they offer, and visit Smashing Magazine again next week for a December calendar background.
• “Applify” your favorite web applications with Google Chrome. Google’s new web browser Chrome is faster than just about any browser out there, and it’s optimized for use with web-based applications. While I don’t recommend it as your primary browser, it does something that no other browser does that makes it a useful addition to your netbook’s program menu: it can package any web-based application as a stand-alone app. Visit a web app like Google Docs or Zoho Writer, click the little page icon next to the address bar and select “Create application shortcuts”. Chrome will place an icon on your desktop which will open the application in its own window, without all the toolbars a normal browser would have. Since Chrome has Google Gears built in, you’ll be able to use many apps even when your offline.
• Sync to your home computer with Windows Live Mesh. Since the netbook isn’t likely to be your main computer, you’re going to want an easy way to get files back to your primary computer. Windows Live Mesh lets you synchronize files between multiple computers — create a Mesh folder on one machine and Mesh duplicates it and everything you put into it on every other computer logged into the same account. What’s more, you can access all your synced files online through the Mesh homepage so even if you don’t have the foresight to take your netbook with you, you can still work on your files. Mesh is free, at least for now.
• Crank long pages up and down. The trackpad on the Aspire One is about 1 1/2” tall, which means scrolling a long page involves a lot of pad-strokes. Or you can go into the mouse settings in the Control Panel and make sure that “ChiralMotion” is  enabled. Get there by clicking “Settings” on the “Device Settings” tab to open the Synaptics trackpad settings. Highlight the “Virtual Scrolling” item in the tree menu and check the “Enable ChiralMotion scrolling” box. ChiralMotion allows you to scroll by making a circular motion instead of stroking down, picking up your finger, stroking down again, picking up your finger, scrolling, and on and on. Begin to scroll on the right side of the trackpad as normal, but instead of stopping, change your downward stroke into a counter-clockwise circle. Reverse to scroll back up. To me, it feels like turning a crank to crank the page up and down. (This feature is not limited to the Acer netbooks – check your non-Aspire mouse settings to see if it’s available for you.)
• Change the screen orientation. Reading long files can be more comfortable with the page in portrait layout, holding the netbook like… well, like a book. It turns out that changing the screen orientation is trivially easy — hold down CTRL-ALT and hit the arrow keys to shift the page. Up is for the normal page layout, down turns it upside-down, the left arrow key puts the top of the screen on the left, the right arrow key puts the top on the right. Pretty neat, huh?

That’s all I’ve got so far, but I’ve only had it for a week. Anyone else have an XP netbook? What tips do you have for your fellow writers?

I nearly forgot! One more thing:

• Pinch to zoom in and out. With a mouse, you can zoom in and out of webpages, images, and documents in most other programs by holding down CTRL and using the scroll wheel. And you can usually do that on a laptop without a mouse by holding CTRL and stroking whatever part of your trackpad doubles as “scroll” (usually the far right edge). But that’s not very practical given the Aspire One’s tiny trackpad, so they’ve brought in a gesture familiar to iPhonen users to replace it: pinch. To zoom in to a page, place your thumb and forefinger tips together on the trackpad and spread them apart; to zoom out, pinch them together. No CTRL key needed!

Image via Wikipedia

Ideas are paradoxical. While hours of urgent deep thought might leave us without a clue, at other times ideas seem to pop into our heads effortlessly, dazzling us with their perfection. Alas, these brilliant moments of inspiration come all too often when we’re busy doing other things — driving, showering, drifting off to sleep, or waiting on line at the bank.

In fact, because our unconscious mind continues to mull things over even when our conscious minds are on other things — especially when our conscious minds are on other things! — is it most likely that our best ideas will come when we’re least prepared. A good part of your job as a writer, then, consists in being prepared for those moments when you’re least prepared.

Ubiquitous capture is the name of the game here — being always ready to grab hold of and record for later use any idea that crosses your mind, when it crosses your mind. Since inspiration might strike in any number of different situations, you’re probably going to want to have several different means of capturing ideas in your writer’s toolkit to assure that, when the moment comes, you’re not left without any means of capturing it for later.

My preferred means of capture is pen-and=paper, and I’m rarely without a pocketful of pens (and my pants all have the ink stains to prove it!) and a notebook in my back pocket. This serves my needs about 80% of the time; the other 20%, when my hands or attention are needed for things like driving, or when my inspiration comes from something I’m reading or looking at on my computer, I rely on somewhat more high-tech tools.

Good old-fashioned pen and paper

Nothing beats the feel of a comfortable pen laying good ink across a smooth page. There’s something almost magical about watching words spin out under your fingertips — so magical that just the act of picking up a pen can inspire us with new ideas.

While a tattered 69-cent spiral-bound notebook can hold your ideas just as well as anything else, a lot of writers (among others) are discovering the joys of writing on high-quality pocket notebooks like the Moleskine. With a rigid cover, elastic strap closure, and creamy paper available in lined, gridded, and blank styles, Moleskines and the wave of copycat notebooks that have followed in the wake of Moleskine’s success offer something more than just a place to write — they offer, if you’ll forgive the expression, a “writing experience”.

Of course, this is fostered in part by Moleskine’s own marketing; each Moleskine comes with an insert explaining the Moleskine story, how artists like Van Gogh and Picasso sketched in Moleskines in French sidewalk cafés, how Hemingway carried one to capture his thoughts, and so on. Of course, it’s codswallop; they used notebooks, of course, but what brand and what style, nobody knows for sure.

What we do know is that Moleskine’s are sturdy and feel good to write in. The paper is just the right thickness to prevent even very liquid inks from bleeding through much, the barely off-white color of the pages is easy on the eyes, and the sturdy binding makes it easy to work in your lap, on the grass, or in your hand just about everywhere. Plus, they hold up well to being tossed around in your purse or backpack, or even to the rigors of back-pocket travel.

They’re pricey: around $11.00 for the pocket-sized notebooks, and they’re never on sale (not that I’ve seen, anyway). You can pick one up at most Borders and Barnes & Noble stores (look up front, near the register) or order them online. $11.00 seems like a lot for a notebook, but trust me, they’re worth it. Still, there are alternatives. Both Target and Wal-Mart sell leather-bound pocket notebooks for $7 or $8 that are clearly inspired by the Moleskine — the same rounded corners, off-white pages, elastic strap, even the signature pocket inside the back cover.

Another alternative are the hard-bound notebooks Office Depot sells under it’s store brand, Foray. Available in letter size, 6’ x 8”, and pocket-sized, these are a bit of a departure from the Moleskine model. The covers are paper-bound and square-cornered, and there’s no elastic strap to keep it closed (on looking, I see they do have an elastic strap). What they do have that’s nice is a cluster of project planning pages at the front, which are great for to-do lists and brainstorming. I use a larger one for each of the projects I work on.

For an even less expensive and lower-tech solution, there’s always index cards. Index cards are cheap, easily available, highly portable, and can be printed on in most printers. One creative index card solution is the Hipster PDA, a fancy tongue-in-cheek name for a stack of index cards bound with a binder clip. A simple idea, but very engaging — Google hipster pda and see all the variations people have come up with to customize this simple idea to their own lifestyles.

One brilliant way to get the most out of index cards is to print on them. D*I*Y Planner has adapted their whole set of free downloadable planner pages to print on 3x5 index cards, including calendars, checklists, address pages, and more. For writers, there are project planners, storyboards, character profiles, story idea forms, and more — you can easily craft a full-featured writing support kit from the available templates. In addition to the core set there are also user-created add-ons and a widget kit so you can create your own.

Idea capture on the computer

What do you do, though, if you can’t pull out a pad of paper and hand-write some notes? Or what if you’re already working at the computer where your notes will eventually end up anyway?

There are tons of programs and services for capturing and storing information from your PC or mobile device. Some allow you to save “clips” of websites and other documents, others allow you to text message notes, and some even allow you to phone in your thoughts, transcribing them into text and forwarding them to wherever you want. Setting up the perfect solution for you might take some trial and error, and any system will take some time to get used to before you trust it enough to start using it as an “outboard brain”, storing whatever crosses your mind and knowing that it will be there later when you’re ready to use it.

Some of the services and software I’ve used include:

• Google Notebook: Google notebook offers a simple, no-frills online notebook that you an type notes into directly or add to using a Firefox extension that adds a “Note this” entry to your right-click menu, allowing you to save either whole pages or selected text on the fly. You can create several notebooks, and sections within each notebook, to keep your thoughts organized; unfortunately, the “Note this” extension always saves to the last opened notebook by default. If you want, you can share your notes privately by sending a special link to your collaborators, or publicly by generating a publicly-available web page.
• del.icio.us: Billed as a social bookmarking service, del.icio.us (now known as “delicious.com”, but I’m old-school!) allows you to bookmark sites, add notes and tags, and search or browse through them easily. Like Google Notebook, they also offer a Firefox extension that places a button in your toolbar — see something you like, click the button, and add notes and tags in the pop-up window. This is great for web research, as you can store all the links to material you’ve come across on the web. Since you can also surf other people’s bookmarks by tags, or search the site, it’s also a good way to find new material you might have otherwise missed.
• Various sidebar programs: There are several sidebar programs that place widgets along the right-hand edge of your screen, and all of them have at least one note-taking widget. If you have a Vista computer, Vista Sidebar is built-in; other solutions include the sidebar included with Google Desktop and Yahoo!’s Konfabulator. As you work, jot your notes into the note-taking widget and go back to the task at hand knowing your idea will be waiting for you when you’re ready.
• Jott: Jott is a voice transcription service you access via any phone whose number you’ve registered with the service. You call Jott (I have it set as a spee-dial number) and leave a voice message; a few minutes later, it’s sent back to you, or to whomever you request, as a text message. The transcription is pretty good, too! The best thing about Jott is that it integrates with tons of other services — you can send to Twitter, post tasks to online to-do lists, even blog with the service. And although they aren’t “official” services, I’ve figured out how to create documents on Google Docs and add notes to Evernote (described below) — see my instructions in this Lifehack post.
• Twitter: Twitter is best known for its socializing function, but you can easily set up a Twitter account to act as an idea repository — one you can add to using the web interface or by sending text messages from your phone. You can even send Tweets from some IM programs and desktop clients like Twhirl and Tweetdeck, or using Jott (see above).
• Evernote: I’ve saved the best for last. Evernote is a powerful note-taking program that exists as both a desktop client and an online service (there’s a Windows Mobile app, and one for iPhone, too, but I’ve never used them). Like Google Notebook, you can add a Firefox extension to save clips from the Web, but you can also use the included Evernote Clipper to add selections from any program on your desktop. And, of course, you can type notes in directly, organize your notes into notebooks, tag them, and so on. Once a note is in Evernote, it’s synched to the online service, so it’s available from anywhere. What’s more, any images are scanned for text which is included in Evernote’s search function (though the text itself isn’t available to users — yet?). It even works pretty well with handwriting! Evernote also allows you to add whole files in PDF format, making it a pretty handy place to store research material, although so far PDFs are only fully indexed (and thus searchable) on the Mac.

There are plenty of other programs, services, and strategies out there for capturing ideas — I’ve only just scratched the surface here. What are some of the ways you capture ideas for later use?

Of all the things that writers have to do, the task that seems the most burdensome is the step that’s most crucial to getting our work into print: submitting it. Sending out submissions isn’t just a bookkeeping nightmare – you have to remember where you sent it and when and how long to wait before following up and whether the work was paid for or not and if not when it’s going to be paid and who you need to contact at each publication and how many times a piece was rejected and when it’s going to be published and… – it’s also an emotionally super-charged experience. Every query or finished piece you send out is yet another chance for some person you don’t know to reject you, and the psychological toll of rejection adds up pretty fast.

WordHustler is a new service that aims to take at least some of the hassle out of submitting. While they don’t offer personal therapy for rejection anxiety sufferers (yet?) they do offer an incredible system for finding markets and contests to submit your work to, sending work out, and tracking your submissions and responses. And it’s a real end-to-end service – they do all the work of evaluating markets, printing manuscripts or queries, and even mailing out your work – all you have to do is select markets, write cover letters, and click “Send”.

Here are some of the things you can do with WordHustler:

• Research markets in their database of over 3,000 magazines, publishing houses, and contests. Each entry is evaluated by hand to weed out scams and assure accuracy.
• Create cover letters and queries using their online LaTeX interface. LaTeX is not a word processor, it’s a typesetting engine, so documents produced on WordHustler look like they’ve been professionally printed. Talk about standing out! (According to Anne Walls, one of the founders, they’re looking at expanding this for the creation of manuscripts as well.)
• Track your projects. You can upload your manuscripts (in PDF format only, for now, but more formats will be accepted down the road), add notes, tags, status, and other information, and search by word count, degree of completeness, or keywords. When a project is done, you can instantly find relevant markets and contests according to genre, tags, and other criteria.
• Send submissions to selected markets. Once you’ve identified a market, written your cover letter, and uploaded your manuscript, WordHustler does the work of assembling your submission, according to the publisher’s guidelines. If the publisher wants the first ten pages, they send the first ten pages. If the publisher wants a reply postcard, they send a reply postcard (pre-addressed to you). Whatever instructions the publisher gives, WordHustler follows.
• Track submissions. Your dashboard lists all the manuscripts you have out, and you can mark off responses as they return.
• Get advice. You and your fellow WordHustlers can comment on markets and vote them up or down, so others benefit from your experience. The WordHustler blog offers advice, interviews, and market information. And they’re growing: more social media and community features are on their way.

The best part is, everything except printing and mailing submissions is free. WordHustler charges only for sending out manuscripts, charging a pretty fair rate for printing, compiling, and shipping your manuscript depending on the size of the submission.

Actually, that’s not the best part. The real best part is that WordHustler is founded and run by two authors, Anne Walls and John L. Singleton, so they know from first-hand experience about the problems writers face. WordHustler was created to manage their own submissions – it grew out of the actual experiences that writers have juggling their submission tracking and market research with the creative work of actually writing. I’ve been emailing back and forth with Walls for the last couple weeks, and it’s clear that her and Singleton’s top priority is to serve the interests of writers.

It’s clear, too, that they continue to look for new ways to add even more value to the service. I emailed Walls with a list of ways I thought WordHustler could be made even more useful; in almost every case, they were already working on the things I’d suggested, and were very open to the few ideas I had that they hadn’t already started working on. That, to me at least, is incredibly promising.

So market listings are free – the point isn’t to profit from listing markets, but to provide writers as much information as possible. Writer feedback on markets is listed, so we all benefit from each other’s experiences. Unethical or predatory markets (like contests that exist solely to drive sales of the published book of “winners”) are removed, or not listed in the first place.

In the final assessment, WordHustler is a well-thought-out and useful service, and I highly recommend writers check it out. As with all tools, it’s entirely possible that it won’t fit your particular style or needs, which is why I put together a whole series on submission tracking techniques and tools – find the one that works for you. But WordHustler is a more-than-worthy addition to that lineup, and goes far beyond just tracking submissions. If you’re an active writer, you will get a lot of use out of WordHustler.

• They’re “push” technology: Instead of waiting for a reader to visit your blog, or check their RSS reader, you “push” newsletters directly into readers’ email inboxes. Since most people check their email daily (at least!) there’s a good chance they’ll read your newsletter the day you send it (or shortly thereafter).
• You build a list: You have a record of the email addresses — and often the name and other information, such as location — of your newsletter readers. This is valuable information for anyone with some marketing savvy; most importantly, it means you can always reach the readers most important to you.
• You have pretty exact numbers: It can be hard to analyze website logs to determine how many people are visiting your site and what they’re doing there. Are unique visitors more important, or daily hits, or time spent on site? How do you put it all together? With email newsletters, you have numbers that are more like a magazines subscription count: while you can’t be positive the people who get the newsletter are reading it, you know exactly how many are getting it.

Use Feedburner to Create Your Newsletter

The easiest way to set up a newsletter is to use Feedburner’s email service. Feedburner is an RSS feed service, but they can take the content of your RSS feed (which is generated automatically by most blogging sites’ software) and send it via email. They handle the signups and confirmations, providing a sign-up form you can embed on your site, and will auto-generate a newsletter whenever there’s new content in your feed.

You can use Feedburner to simply recreate your blog in email form — every time you post, your list will get a copy of the post via email. Since only a small percentage of websurfers really “get” RSS, this provides a way to turn first-time visitors into regular readers. You can customize the header of your newsletter with a logo, and include ads in your newsletters if you want.

With very little work, you could also create a specialized newsletter “channel”, offering premium or bonus content in addition to your blog — or instead of blogging at all. In WordPress, you can easily set up a category of posts that don’t get published to the front page, and generate category-specific feeds (they’re at “http://yoursitename.com/category/categoryname/feed” for each category). Create a “newsletter” category, and feed its URL to Feedburner. If you’d like to send newsletters out on a specific day, simply schedule all your posts to be published on that day using the WordPress “Schedule” function. On the allotted day, Feedburner will collect all the posts from your RSS feed, apply your custom formatting and header, and generate a table of contents that will appear at the top of your newsletter.

Stikk has come up with a way to make sure there are consequences if you fail. Stikk is an online service that allows you to set up a “contract” with yourself, and back it up with money. You deposit $10, $20, $100, or whatever amount is worth working for, and if you achieve your goal, you get it back. If not, the money is donated to one of several charities Stikk has established partnerships with.

If putting your own money on the line isn’t enough to keep you motivated, Stikk has another card up their sleeve: the anti-charity. Select this option, and not only will you lose your money if you fail to reach your goal, but Stikk will donate it to a charity you hate. If you’re pro-life, it will go to a pro-choice charity; pro-choice writers can choose a pro-life one.

Stikk allows you to self-report whether you’ve failed or succeeded, working on the honor system. If you don’t quite trust yourself to be honest, you can designate a third-party “referee” to verify your success or failure. Pick someone you trust to be fair — if they say you’ve failed, you’ve failed, as far as Stikk is concerned.

You can set Stikk up to track a single big goal, but you can also set incremental goals — like, “write 5,000 words a week). I wouldn’t set goals that are more granular than that, since you do need to log in and report success or failure for each goal — or your referee does, if you choose to have one. Try to find a “sweet spot” that’s frequent enough to keep you working steadily but not so frequent that keeping your Stikk account up-to-date eats into your writing time.

One is the word count tracking feature — you can add a word count to each manuscript as you add it, or go back in and update the word count on a daily basis. Writer’s Database then generates a graph, showing you your output on a weekly basis. Useful for keeping on top of your productivity.

Another useful feature is the “Shared Markets” section. Since Writer’s Database is web-based, users can share information with the entire community. You have the option sharing any new market you add, and clicking “Shared Markets” will show you all the markets other users have shared. This is a great way to find out about new markets.

Everything in Writer’s Database is searchable, as well, which can help you to find markets you’ve forgotten about or submissions when you can’t remember all the details. And a set of new “gadgets” — plugins for your Google or Netvibes homepage, as well as a Yahoo Konfabulator widget and a Mac OSX dashboard widget — allow you to track your submissions in a number of different ways.

Web-based applications aren’t for everyone, but Writer’s Database is well-designed, well-programmed, and more or less intuitive. It’s definitely worth a look, and with the word count tracking, may well become a part of your everyday routine.

A lot of writers get by with a binder or note-book, flipping through pages and updating each entry by hand, but this can get messy pretty quickly if you’re at all prolific — and if you’re not, remembering to update your binder (or even remember where it is) when the changes you’re tracking come infrequently can be a problem.

Submission tracking is simple, formulaic, and repetitive — exactly the kind of task that computers are especially good for. There are quite a few ways to track submissions on a computer, from plain text files that reproduce the format of pen-and-paper systems to specialized programs designed particularly for the task.

Any system you use needs to do several things easily and reliably. You need to be able to tell when a piece was sent, whether you’ve heard back yet, and what the response was. You also need to be able to link submissions to the market it was sent to, in case you need to follow up. If you send out queries, your submission tracking system needs to tell you what ideas you need to work into full pieces and when they’re due. And it needs to tell you when to expect payment, and how much — again, so you can follow up if necessary.

Over the course of the week, we’ll look at several different ways to track submissions. Check them out and decide what system is going to work best for you.

Better yet, PlotBot allows you and any number of collaborators to log in and work on the same screenplay at the same time. You can set your script to “Private”, allowing in only the people you’ve invited, or “Public”, letting you set up open projects that anyone can contribute to. You can even do a “Showdown”, letting people write their own screenplays to a prompt you provide, useful for competitions or just plain fun.

Creating a new project is easy. Once you’re logged in, click “New Project” and you’ll be asked to name your project and write a description. The next page allows you to assign a copyright, offering your choice of “All rights reserved” or any Creative Commons license.

PlotBot offers lots of great options to you can add to your project — you can add a project blog, write style guidelines, and add reference documents and character descriptions. The interface basically walks you through the process of writing — first you create an outline, the you add scenes, and then you flesh out each scene. There’s also a section for notes.

In the screenwriting section proper, you are given options to write sluglines, actions, or dialogue. Each presents you with a text entry field that offers only what you need for that kind of line — for example, the dialogue lines have a field for the name of the speaker and a box for their line. Sluglines offer a drop-box to select either “INT” or EXT”. As you add different types of text, it’s automatically formatted for you.

To edit text, you just click on it and it immediately becomes live, with whatever options are available for that kind of line. Every line is stamped with its author and the time of the last edit, and you can attach comments to each separate line. It’s all very slick and fun to use.

Finished screenplays or drafts can be printed directly from the browser, downloaded as a Rich Text File (that can be opened in any word processor without losing its formatting), or downloaded in XML, which the programmers admit is useless at the moment — but since it’s a standard, it’s assumed that future applications will be able to use it somehow.

All in all, PlotBot is a very well-conceived and well-executed application. It may not be as flexible as your desktop version of Final Draft (or even your free version of Rough Draft), but it’s fun, available everywhere, and offers collaboration features that even Final Draft can’t boast. And, as a final note, you can set the interface to any of over a dozen languages (though some translations are more complete than others) — including Pirate! Arrr, that be good!

PlotBot (Free)

The web makes working with other writers and/or clients easier than ever. Gone are the days of posting typescripts of chapters back and forth between co-authors — now you can log in and instantly see what your collaborator has written or changed. And if you don’t like what you see, you can easily check the history of your documents, reverting to earlier versions if something goes horribly awry.

There are three basic approaches to web-based collaboration:

1. Live interaction: You and your collaborator(s) gather around a virtual whiteboard and add, edit, and delete in real time.
2. Online revision: You work on a document online and give permission to selected others to see and modify your work.
3. Document management: You upload a file (or create one) and allow others to download it, edit it, and re-upload their changes.

For writers, the easiest and most likely is online revision, but let’s look at solutions for all three.

Live collaboration

Live collaboration systems allow several authors to gather virtually around a single document, discuss it, and make changes that are instantly seen by others (usually highlighted a different color for each writer). The technology isn’t very advanced, yet, but there are a few applications that offer this ability.

• Gobby: Intended for programmers, Gobby is a free program that allows several users to make changes and see others changes. Each user’s changes are highlighted in the color they select. The bottom pane is a live chatroom. The file format is text-only, so you can’t add formatting like bold or italics. Runs on Windows, Linux, and OS X.

  Gobby is still under development, so expect to see improvements along the way.

• SynchroEdit: SynchroEdit is an online collaboration space, allowing several authors to work on a document at the same time. Each author’s changes are highlighted a different color. Allows basic formatting (bold, italic, text align, headers). Includes a chat pane in the lower right hand corner. When the document is finished, you can have it emailed to you; at the moment, it comes in the body of your email. Hopefully they’ll add text exporting to typical file formats as they develop it.

  SynchroEdit is also under development, and at the moment runs on any operating system but can only be accessed using Firefox or its derivatives.

Online revision

Websites that allow you to invite others to revise work have become quite common as the technology has matured. Almost any online word processor will allow this, though two users cannot work on the same document at the same time (unlike the live systems described above). Here, I’ll focus on only a few.

• Google Docs: Google Docs is the current king of the online word processing space. Documents can be uploaded or created online, and you cna invite any number of partners to view or edit your documents. Clicking the “Revisions” tab will show you all previous versions of a document. When finished, the document can be downloaded in several formats, including Word doc and Adobe pdf, or published directly to the web. Simple, easy to use, and with several gigabytes of free online storage, you can keep an entire career’s worth of writing safe and secure online.

  Other online word processors like Zoho Writer, ThinkFree, and the text editor Writeboard (which offers no formatting options) work much the same way; all are free.

• Adobe Buzzword: I could have included Buzzword in the list of online word processors above, but I like it so much I decided to give it its own entry in this list. Buzzword is a gorgeous online word processor with some pretty good sharing features. Click “Share” in the lower left-hand corner, and you can invite collaborators as co-authors (allows full editing privileges), reviewers (allows commenting), or readers (allows reading only, no changes). Click the “History” icon in the lower right (it looks like a Greek statue), and you can instantly view previous versions of the document. Insert a cursor into any line and a comment bubble comes up in the right-hand margin; click it and leave comments. The same document can be open by several people at the same time; changes are collated together automatically. Buzzword’s collaboration features complement nicely it’s really powerful and attractive word processor.
• WriteWith: A full-fledged integrated collaborating system, WriteWith allows you to upload documents or create them online, edit them, assign and track tasks (with deadlines) to collaborators, and save finished documents or drafts to your computer in Word format. Changes are highlighted with a different color for each user. You can easily see who is editing a document at any given moment, and leave notes for future writers. If I could get Buzzword wrapped in WriteWith’s project management tools, I’d be totally happy!

Check-in, check-out: document management online

Document management systems allow users to check out a document, edit it, and check it back in. Well-established among corporate users, these systems are only starting to come online in stripped-down versions. There are lots of complicated systems you ahve to install and maintain yourself, but Microsoft’s Office Live Workspace promises to make much of this functionality available to everyone.

• Microsoft Office Live Workspace: Invite-only at the moment, this extension of the Office Live program allows you to upload documents and share them online, setting permissions as to who can read, download, or edit your documents. Revision history is tracked at the site. You can preview documents online, but can only edit them by downloading them into MS Office — fortunately, Microsoft offers a toolbar add-in for Office that makes this simple.
• You can also use project management software like BaseCamp or Wrike to store and share files; like MS Workspaces, you’ll download them, edit them, and re-upload them. However, these systems rarely offer any sort of revision tracking. On the other hand, they offer useful features like todo lists, milestones, task assignments, and scheduling.

Of course, you could just email files back and forth, which isn’t an entirely impractical way to collaborate if you’re comfortable suing Word’s “track changes” function (or the equivalent in your word processor), and you’re using the same word processor as your collaborators.

If you do anything more complex than reviewing what others have written and sending your won writing for review, you should take a look at shifting from email to an online system designed for collaboration. You don’t have to worry about what software to use, or about someone forgetting to send an email or attach a file, or about getting lost in the sea of tracked changes. Instead, you can just focus on doing your writing — which is a pretty good deal, I think!