#WriterWednesday: Geek Gear To Get You Motivated

I'm waving my geek flag like a crazy lady lately. We've covered how I like my tech from e-readers to smartphones to tablets...but I've found a few new techie tools lately that I really, really love...so I thought I'd share them with you all today because they all have a little bit of a writer bent.

First, my new TomTom - it's the MultiSport, and it's a fitness watch. It tracks my distance running, cycling, swimming...monitors my heart rate, gives me a calorie count and feeds right in to the MyFitnessPal app that I'm using to track calories and stay in my fat-burning zone. What does this have to do with writing? Everything. Seriously. As a writer I sit. A lot. Sitting isn't terrible, but when I'm at the computer for 6+ hours a day, I'm not getting much  movement in. I can set an alarm on my TomTom to remind me every hour or so to get up and move around. Plus, I know exactly how I'm doing with my workouts. Win, win.

Second, Spotify. You've all read countless posts about my playlists. Making a new playlist is one of my all-time-favorite things to do as I'm starting a new project. But I've filled 2 iPods, an iPod Touch and my Smartphone with different songs...I came across Spotify, which is a streaming service, last year and gave it a try. I still buy a ton of music, but this is working really well for me as a playlist keeper.


Third, OneNote. It's a visual pinboard kind of app from Microsoft. I use Scrivener, and I like it, but OneNote is so much simpler - and its really easy to add both images and text. That said, I'm taking a Scrivener class and I'll let you know how that goes - will it overtake OneNote? We'll see. This screen shot is my template for starting a new project - I have tabs for research, chapter outlines, hero/heroine/town/etc images. I break out the main turning points and even make a calendar of sorts so I know where I'm at in the project at any given time.

Scrivener does many of the same things, I find Scrivener most useful for the actual writing...but for the extra stuff - research, images, outlines, etc - I find OneNote much more useful.

Those are the three things I'm geeking over this week...what has your geek heart thumping?