good writing software for windows

Every so often, when I’m a hater on MS Word or kind of blah about OpenOffice Writer, or not down with le SciTE I do a search for what writing software is on the market. Usually I’m a little disappointed at the end. One time I found Liquid Story Binder, which is good, but for me LSB is just too much. Maybe at some point I’ll go back to it.

Imagine my surprise tonight when I found PageFour, courtesy of literatureandlatte.com. I’ve only just played around with it a little bit so far and it looks really close to what I’ve wanted, for like, forever. Clean, simple, organized. Get a free demo on the PageFour download.

from the basic bookcase: Brightness Reef

So I pulled this one from Savage Review’s Basic Bookcase and as I mentioned earlier I’ll be reading every single one of them there books…well, not exactly, I only made it to page 114 of Brightness Reef before doing my usual, “hmm….let’s see what happens on page…312!”.

However as a study in sf/f, this book is a good one. Multiple POV characters, six races, multiple (English-y) languages, diverse cultures, technologies, and ecologies, those little italicized sections at the beginning of chapters, you know, attributed to ‘Rek-kwan, sixth chapter of the first pamphlet, 1204 a.y.’. Italics. In general, a lot of italics.

The writing was a little flat. I confess the whole thing left me unimpressed, and since this was my first shot at Brin I may sample some of Brin’s earlier stuff, such as Startide Rising, to give the guy a fair shake.

Bookcase worthy? Nay.

books: the original text game

Really what I mean by that title is I’m embarking on a reading series for lack of a better word, inspired by the site of John Savage. If you don’t know that site, Savage created something called “The Basic Bookcase”, a big huge list of SF to read. I’ve always felt that I was not well read in SF despite being a big fan of reading it (and writing it if I ever get my act together).

What I’m going to do is read every book from Savage’s bookcase and then write a short impression of each book here. No, really. I’ll file it all under reading.