SFWritersU

Also, get business cards to hand out!  There may not be the perfect agent at the conference, but we can always ask for referrals and if they have your information readily available, it will be easier for them to make the referral.

Awesome, we'll have to connect!  I'll make sure I bring a camera so that we can take photos to post for those who can't make it. 

Ok I will do -- I sent out a few proposals and got nowhere.  I'm thinking what I've read must be true, that I'll need to meet some people, try to be interesting, and see if THEN there might be interest.  I have read that agents get hundreds of queries every week or so, and trying to get one to stand out in that seems rough.  Anyhow I LOVE San Francisco, and happy to go to there for any excusable reason...  Good luck with your work!  Did you upload any of it on this site?

You'll have to let me know how it is.  I don't think I'm going to make it this year, but would love to hear about it.  I'm sending out a mountain of proposal packages for my novel and wondering if attending these conferences is really the key to getting a novel published.

I am! So psyched!  Never been to one.

Hi.  Thanks for your input.  I went with a program called Write It Now 4, available on Amazon.  It works well, but if you are looking to take a novel out of Word and transfer it over to Write It Now, then reformat back to word to fit specifications, expect to go through and do some indenting work, etc.  It is much easier than reformattiing everything manually in Word.  Who's going to the Writer's Conference this year?

I bought something called "Dramatica Writer's Dreamkit" software.  It's this group out of USC that has their own theory of story writing/construction they call "Dramatica."  The software is ok, as far as I can tell, but it's the only one of that I'd ever bought.  It helped me balance out the novel.  What was even more interesting, though, and made it definitely worth the price was the lectures that came with it.  I listened to them over and over.  There were many hours and it was terrific - fascinating, actually, with so much insight and so well thought out.  For me, I think was terrifically helpful.

I have been working with a program called New Novelist.  My work is fantasy but it has programs for all types of genres.  It's been very helpful and reasonably inexpensive.  Hope this helps.  Loved your profile...looks like you have a lot of different type of work you like to do!

I use ywriter from spacejock.

http://www.spacejock.com/yWriter5.html?yWriter5

There are several I've tried and like. Perhaps the best for my Mac OSX machines is Storymill by Mariner Software. For drafting scenes and character studies, sometimes dialogs I like WriteRoom, which allows you to blank out everything else on your screen except your own "customized" writing environment. I also have several for my iPad and iPod devices. 

Just wish I had more time for writing novels, but I also love creating websites for my authors :-)