It’s almost 1 AM here in Michigan. This time of night is always bittersweet for me; it’s the time when I get my second wind, when I’m on a flow with writing, when everything is silent and I can slip into my little world and my story practically writes itself. It’s also the time I need to go to sleep because my little ones will be up in a few hours and this mum is grumpy unless she gets a full eight hours of sleep. 😛 It’s difficult to write during other times of the day, though I do try and squeeze in a sentence here or a paragraph there. If I can get a full page written during daylight hours, I’m ecstatic. Today has not been one of those days, however. I didn’t write anything new – I was able to go over and correct some mistakes and tweak a few parts, but nothing substantial.

Between my children, chores and wrestling chewed up shoes from my Newfie, I was able to research into some helpful writing tools. After reading so much about Grammarly and ProWritingAid, I decided to download them both and give them a whirl.

I downloaded the free Grammarly add-on and I was IMPRESSED. It was quick, easy to use and so much better than the Word grammar checker. I can only imagine how good the premium version is. It offers a lot of advice and correction suggestions without being overbearing and complicated.

For ProWritingAid I found a 40% off coupon and purchased a year subscription for $36. First, I uploaded the Rise To Fall manuscript to their online programme and it wasn’t great. It reformatted everything, changed the font type and size, aligned everything to the left, etc. When I clicked on “summary” it crashed my browser. I downloaded the add-on for Word, which required restarting my laptop, and after all that was done, I opened up Rise To Fall. Holy crap. The amount of options was overwhelming, but in a good way. The summary of the document was highly detailed, clear and concise. Slowly I started to go through the 20+ options individually but I didn’t make it through everything, there was so much to look at and not enough time.

At first I thought I was going to have to make use of PWA’s 14 day refund policy, but I’m happy to say I won’t be doing that after all. It’s incredible how detailed the analysis of the document is, even if it’s going to take me a while to get through it all. I’m excited to see how well using the two programmes together will help me with my writing.

I will most probably write more on the two programmes at a later date, but for now it’s bed time.

Before I go, I received the edits for Rise To Fall this evening, yay! I’m hoping that by the end of March, Rise To Fall will be ready for release! No promises, mind you. 😉

Sleep well! – GSKT