Amanuensis

Amanuensis is a writer's editor that lets you edit your story the way you want - not the way the software is designed. Basically, no matter what your working style is, Amanuensis can be modified to work that way. This allows you to get your writing done faster and more efficiently and it also allows you to keep all your writing related material in one place.

If you are the kind of person who likes to plot out the whole story before you get started with the actual writing, then you can simply use Amanuensis' treeview and the summary window to flesh out the outline for the story. You can drag and drop each branch on the treeview to reorder the flow of the story since all story elements are stored on a per-branch basis.

Once you've fleshed out the whole story, just start typing out each section of the story based on your notes. If you find that the order of the sections need to change at this stage, again all you have to do is drag and drop the tree branches to reorder the story.

On the other hand, if you are the type of person who plots out the story as you go along, you can close the summary view and have more space to work with. If you get an idea for section further along in the story, you can simply create branches in the treeview for these sections or you can create notes in the bottom pane to hold these ideas. The bottom notes pane is independent of the treeview and so can store global reference information or story notes.

The bottom notes pane is an ideal place to define individual scene information or to jot down information on your characters and locations so that you can immediately access all your notes for a given character or location.

If you don't like the reference pane or don't want to have it open all the time, you can simply close it so that it's out of the way. Just keep on typing in the edit pane and use the treeview to reorder your story sections.

If you are the type of person who doesn't like breaking your story up into sections but instead simply wants a good lightweight editor to work in, then you can close the treeview as well and use the main editor pane to do your writing. The status bar will constantly provide you with word and page counts as well as information on any text selections you might make.

In addition to the simplicity, ease of use and the multiple working options, Amanuensis also provides live spellchecking as well as a built-in thesaurus to make writing easier. Not only that, Amanuensis also integrates with the free WordWeb program (or it's paid cousin, WordWeb Pro) to provide you with even more word checking functionality.

That's not all, considering that you might not want anything to happen to your manuscript due to program glitches or data corruption, Amanuensis provides multiple levels of backups as well as an auto-save feature. Each time your file is saved, you can specify that it be backed up first. Not only that, you can specify that you have multiple levels of backups.