NEO – Fiction without Friction

Sorry, couldn’t help myself. I was tempted to make “Fiction without Friction” the tag line for NEO, but it’s only (kinda) clever the first time you hear it. I’ll (probably) never say it again.

I’ve been blogging about NEO for over ten years now. I’ve been writing exclusively inside NEO for most of this year. Quite a few authors I know have adopted NEO as their go-to for getting that rough draft written. With more users and more time, the program has been smoothed over and most of the pesky bugs have been squashed. NEO is ready for prime time!

To that end, I put NEO on its own landing page, here on my site: www.hughhowey.com/neo. I also created a short-ish video on how to acquire, install, and use NEO:

I get nothing out of you using the software. It’s just something that’s amplified my writing sessions, and if it helps anyone else, then I’m chuffed to the max. My biggest hope is that a novel that might not have existed without NEO will now see the light of day and find a reader out there, somewhere.

Not only is it free, forever, it also doesn’t collect any data about you or upload your books anywhere. Everything you write is saved on your computer. And your entire bookcase is backed up daily and saved for two weeks, just in case. If you want an online backup, link your Neo Library to iCloud or DropBox. You can also email yourself copies of your WIP with a keypress.

NEO exports to Word, for when you need to do an editorial pass with tracked changes. Or PDF if you want to share with beta readers. Or you can export straight to .epub with a table of contents and Amazon-approved formatting.

The ENTER, ENTER, ENTER philosophy behind NEO is what keeps me writing. No more formatting section breaks or new chapter headers. No more re-numbering chapters. Hit ENTER once for a new paragraph. Hit it again for a new section break. A third ENTER gets you a new chapter. I like to think of this as NEO’s enterface. (groan. I know)

Word count progress bars, daily goals, a 30 day writing history, and word sprints are all there to motivate you. Quick notes let you drop a to-do so you can keep writing and google something or make up a proper noun later. The “Darlings” tab is a place to drag and drop text you aren’t in love with without losing it forever. Everything about NEO is there to remove the friction of authoring your next novel.

That’s it. Something I made for me that I’m offering for free. Now back to my own writing…

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