Found

In a post earlier this month I lamented the lack of decent low-price authoring software on the PC (as compared to Macs).

Corvus suggested I check out Celtx.

Oddly enough, I had already. There was a copy of the program sitting right in my Programs menu. An old copy. From last year. Sometimes I forget what I download.

I vaguely recall not being happy with the program.

But I have since revised that opinion. Many versions later this is easily one of the best editing programs for anything: novels, screenplays, poems, notes.

The best part is that it's free.

The coolest feature is the ability to upload your work as public or private. Public and you can get feedback from all the other people using the program. Private and, well, you can't. But regardless, uploading allows you to sync your files on any computer that has Celtx installed. This is completely awesome.

The developers listen to the community and seem to be eager to place new features but also selective in order to avoid feature creep. The program is stable and fast.

The only function I've found myself wanting is a way to strip formatting from a body of text. I do lots of cutting and pasting from gmail and it comes with a lot of stray bits. The only way I've found to avoid this is pasting to a separate Notepad file and then cutting and pasting from there, which is not convenient at all. It's possible that I just haven't discovered that option yet.

So thanks, Corvus, for reminding me about this program. I've already begun transferring a large bulk of my writing and started in on a second draft of my first novel.