My Top Five Most Used Writing Software:

–Freemind: mindmapping software, great for brainstorming. It’s free and available for PC, Mac and Linux, too.

–Scrivener: awesome novel-writing software for the Mac, although so far I’ve mainly used it for writing detailed synopses. It has lots of nifty features such as index cards, full-screen mode for text processing… Paying, and only available for the Mac.

–Writers’ Café: my index-card tool of choice on Windows, allows a good view of several storylines. There’s all sorts of other stuff, but I haven’t really looked at them. Paying, and cross-platform PC/Mac/Linux.

–Sonar: sub tracking system written by the awesome Simon Haynes. I used to have Duotrope, but since I’m often offline, I rather prefer my information to be where I can access it even with the internet down. Free, available for Windows and Linux. Simon also has novel writing software, ywriter, which is good (just not suited to the way I work, because it’s somewhat overdetailed for my first draft process).

–Dropbox: basically, a versioning system made easy. Dropbox synchronises the contents of your local files with an online repository. It’s great for backups, and also for working on the same folder on several computers (since I own three, and on two different OS, this is rather welcome). Free, available for PC, Mac and Linux.

(for actual writing, I use Word, which I can get on any platform–including computers that aren’t mine. Plus, I tend to receive edits in Word’s Tracking Changes format, so it makes my life easier. I wish Word would stop randomly crashing on huge files, but I guess you can’t have everything)

Any other cool software I should be aware of?