Templates from the Toolshed
Excel Word Tracker
Keep your writing goals in sight with this easy-to-use Excel word tracker. Monitor your daily progress, visualize your consistency, and stay motivated on your journey to finishing your manuscript. It’s simple, effective, and completely free.
My Writing Toolkit
Obsidian
There’s no greater tool for a ‘Second Brain’, in my opinion. It’s fully customisable to suit your needs for all areas of interest. This is where I store my Kindle highlights, description thesaurus, dictionary of words I’ve looked up, project notes, daily tasks, personal journey, several versions of the Bible with verse-by-verse commentary, gardening tips and tricks and plans for the year, worldbuilding notes styled like wiki pages, character sheets, and beat-by-beat plans of my novels. It’s fully scalable with custom templates and plugins, and very well worth the investment of your time and energy.
Microsoft Word
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. This is the industry’s gold standard and my chosen tool for the final mile. While I may draft elsewhere, all my work is typed up and polished in Word. I can then add comments in-line to review or remind myself later, and format for querying agents and future publication. The synchronisation with OneDrive on my iPhone has allowed me to untether from a desk and take my work with me anywhere.
Microsoft Excel
This isn’t only for tracking word count; I also use it for the business side of the writer’s journey, like tracking which agents I’m querying and what status my characters and novels are in. Sometimes you just need a good spreadsheet to give you clear data at a glance, and Excel excels at this.
Supernote
A fantastic tool for taking notes during talks and sermons, but also for writing first drafts. The handwriting recognition struggles with my chicken-scratch, but the search functionality is superb, and allows me to create searchable headers and tags in-line with a true paper-like feel that beats Remarkable. I used to write my first drafts in Pukka Pads. Now they grow and live in my Supernote.
Wonderdraft
For me, a fantasy world truly begins with its map. It’s a tool for questioning the history of my secondary worlds, from their very creation to the rise of political factions thousands of years in the future. Wonderdraft is my cartographer’s studio, where I plot how far my characters have travelled, how far they’ve yet to go, and more importantly: what’s going to get in their way. It allows me to create beautiful, reference-quality maps that I use throughout my entire writing process.