Writers Victoria Writer's Toolkit

Networking: Learning and sharing online. Toolbox:Twitter, Facebook pages and groups, Goodreads, Hootsuite

"Enhance your social media management with HootSuite, the leading social media dashboard. Manage multiple networks and profiles." You can set up tabs and columns to follow different hashtags or information streams.

"Instantly connect to what's most important to you. Follow your friends, experts, favorite authors, and breaking news." Also, the most valuable professional development and networking tool around.

Local author Kate Holden's Facebook page: updates and news, opinions, and very human conversation.

Official fan page on Facebook for international YA author Cassandra Clare. Sample of a genuine fan page, with lots of competitions, trailers, fan art and fan fic.

Interesting if you like keeping an eye out for what is happening in the international writing world.

Interesting....... 'All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.' George Orwell, with his breezy advocacy of a very British 'common sense', often seems as much crackpot as savant.

For owners of Apple devices, iCloud stores and synchs a wide range of file types across all your devices. 5GB of free storage.

Thanks, Kelly. I try it out.

Find images that *may* be able to be used for publication, or at the very least for private research, inspiration and source books.

(And the cats that tolerate them. :) )

"Dark Room is a full screen, distraction free, writing environment. Unlike standard word processors that focus on features, Dark Room is just about you and your text." For Windows.

In summary: write for 25 minutes bursts with short breaks in between. Time it properly and focus on your work.

Like Dropbox, stores and synchs your files on both your machine and in the cloud. Also provides you with Google Docs (like Microsoft office products), great for collaborating with others on documents in real time.

We skipped over this, but for anyone who needs to manage data about lots of resources in different formats (eg books, links, PDFs, journal articles), Zotero is a very powerful free tool which grabs bibliographic data or metadata from anywhere and manages it for you. Can output bibliographies in all the usual styles. An alternative to EndNote or RefWorks.

/drools/ That's really cool - thanks!

Paid iPad app ($5) which provides the index card functionality of Scrivener and integrates with it. So you can plot and scheme on your iPad, and then synch it with your larger project in Scrivener.

'"I have read and agree to the Terms" is the biggest lie on the web. We aim to fix that.' Community does the hard work of reading all the terms and conditions small print, then rates the service and points out key issues for each.

Mind-mapping integrated into Scrivener, for Mac only - sadly ($15)

The name says it all - a simple app for taking notes or writing on your mobile device, but in this case it also synchs your notes into Scrivener.

Stores your documents on your machine AND in the cloud. Access from anywhere via the web. Synchs up so you always have two current versions.