Writers Victoria Writer's Toolkit

Keep track of all your bookmarks and access them from any device. Share with groups, and join groups or search Diigo to get the best of other people's resources

Use feedly to subscribe to news sites and blogs, and then you can read all your updates in one place.

Find apps to add to Chrome to integrate your other tools (eg Evernote and Diigo). Then when you find a web page you like - anywhere - one click of a button will save it to your Evernote or Diigo account.

Mark any web page to read later, eg on your phone or iPad (or computer). Pocket works offline, so you can keep reading in a train tunnel or without wifi.

A panel of publishers, writers and journalists at the Emerging Writers' Festival shared their tips on getting paid for your writing.

I've belonged to this for more than ten years. It is a huge community of people who write, at all levels of experience. Mostly Americans, but many from all around the English-speaking world. There is a free course you can do to see if you like it, before paying to join. If you join, there are many interest groups, self-moderated. I belong to one focusing on literary short story writing, invitation only, full at the moment and not taking members. There are groups writing every kind of genre you can think of. The standard varies hugely from group to group, and from course to course.

I keep copies of all my writing on this Cloud site.

I use Dropbox for pictures and Google Drive for text, in essence. The benefit of Google Drivein my opinion is that it ties in (almost) seamlessly with Google's online word processing tools.

Agreed. Simple to use and really terrific for online collaboration. Slightly different concept as the files aren't natively in Word or Excel or whatever, but still very handy.

My favorite dictionary. You have to pay to use it.

Good addition. This is often cited as the dictionary standard for Australian authors. You can access it free if you join the State library and many of your local public libraries too.

Some good inspirational presentations and talks to get you thinking. Regularly update with new ones, and very topical, sometimes confronting.

This is the free web-based mind mapping program I mentioned last night; it's basic but has all the functionality that most of us would need.

Another possible Google Reader replacement - has a good rap so far, and promises to work on ANYTHING. You folk with old Safari versions - try to break it.

I just discovered this app - iTunes blurb below: A Novel Idea is the premier tool for plotting your story and recording bursts of inspiration. Use its simple interface to create your characters, locations, scenes, and novels and then link them together to create your story's plot. Use the Idea feature to quickly jot down your creative sparks and link them to your story elements.

Downloaded for a play. Looks good - pity no timeline though. Another good thought capturer I was using was Werdsmith but I think Novel Idea has more features.

One for the nonfiction writers especially but everyone will benefit, I think. Snopes debunks urban legends, lies and ridiculous social media campaigns by a team of fact-checkers. It is very fast and pretty reliable.

A fabulous post by YA author Libba Bray on her writing (or not) process. Hilarious but true. Recommended reading.

I spent ages one day checking the dates on my spices and tossing out the ones that were old. At the end of that time I had no writing and lots of empty spice bottles - in alphabetical order. I loved this article. I'm sticking to short stories. Novels sound even more horrifying to try to produce.

This is the site I mentioned last week that sends you a random piece out of a book each day. Non-fiction. Good for ideas to write about, or just interesting. American.

Here's the Delanceyplace snippet I mentioned about soldiers.

This is the home site for AWM. Each Wednesday night they invite people to write for an hour together, via Facebook. I think you don't need to be a member to join in.

Perhaps the most famous paid ($10) noise blocking software for Mac that cuts out distractions to allow you to write.

"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.

Some of the hand-made plot systems, timelines, etc by Rowling, Heller, Faulkner and others.