What Is Little Acorns?
Right As A Button
Little Acorns is a simple-to-use notes organisation application for writers.
How simple?
Well, for openers, every operation is cued by the click of an on-screen button.
This attribute alone will turbo-charge the evolution of your idea from lightbulb inspiration –
through the accretion of related notes –
to the moment when it is fit to be dubbed a first draft.
On The Button
Little Acorns was created to warehouse your notes efficiently.
Sift through them to your art's content.
Get them in order.
Copy them to your word-processing package.
All via single clicks of on-screen buttons.
More Is Less
Notepad? Index card deck? Corkboard?
Little Acorns is all of these and more.
For being less.
Less?
Less complicated.
What Isn’t Little Acorns?
Lacks Style? You Bet!
If text aligning/colouring/spacing/wrapping – in short, desktop publishing – is what you’re after, you’ll have to turn elsewhere.
(Towards one of the word-processing packages on every device you own, perhaps.)
But if the warehousing of every epiphany you’ve ever had is what you require, you’ve come to the right place.
Y Nix WP?
Word-processing programmes exist on every platform.
On every device you own.
We saw no need, then, to mock up another.
Instead, Little Acorns concentrates on doing something exclusive:
Warehousing your notes.
Organising them into a form fit to be copied to your word-processing package.
Tooled Precision
Word-processing packages boast impressive toolsets for formatting digital documents.
Unfortunately, this never includes an efficient device for organising the notes that constitute them.
Couldn’t my spreadsheet programme handle that?
Well, you might use it to arrange your notes in neat rows.
And divide them into discrete groups?
A spreadsheet programme might be coaxed into doing this.
If you execute all the cumbersome cutting and pasting.
Little Acorns, on the other hand, will reorder category headings and the notes under them at a single mouse click.
Who Is Little Acorns For?
Hey, Mr Producer!
Short stories, novels, plays, screenplays, poems, lyrics, comic book scripts, comedy routines, histories, essays, journalism, blog posts, dissertations...
Whatever you write – howsoever you write – Little Acorns will gather all of the preparatory material, and organise it.
Such that an encompassing project seems possible.
Inevitable.
It functions, then, much like a theatrical producer.
Leo Bloom?
More Cameron Mackintosh.
We Need To Talk
Short story writers, novelists, playwrights, screenwriters, poets, lyricists, comic book writers, comedians, historians, philosophers, academics, essayists, journalists, blog posters, students...
Little Acorns is for anyone who has ever committed a note to print.
Or wished they had done on recalling that they came up with something that had potential.
But can't remember what it is, precisely.
Or where they jotted it down.
Compulsive Impulsives
Little Acorns is for compulsive note takers.
Impulsive note makers.
Shakers.
Three a.m. wakers.
What Is Little Acorns For?
Spare Tired
Ever been driven spare – nuts – trying to recall on which page of which notepad you scribbled down the switcheroo that might make your thousand-pager pop?
Feared you used the argument at the heart of your latest essay in the last one?
No – The one before the one before last?
Riffled through an autumn forest floor of sticky notes/napkins/beer mats after the formula that – coupled with the insight that just came to you – might constitute a whole new paradigm?
Little Acorns will deliver you from such dilemmas.
Out of many, one.
No matter how long you spend editing an individual note, a time will come when you want – need – to work on all of your notes as a cohesive whole.
Little Acorns will hasten that moment.
Selling Out Best-sellers
Little Acorns won’t bash out a best-seller for you.
But it will store, sift and weave together the umpteen epiphanies that might give rise to it.
Leaving nothing for you to do but join the dots?
Well, ensure you’ve dotted the end of every sentence.
Crossed through every cliche.
A Database Application - What's That?
A Firm Base For Your Data
Little Acorns is a database application.
What’s that?
A word-processing package is the best tool for formatting digital text.
A spreadsheet the ideal application for the analysis of numbers.
And a database the most efficient means to organise data.
Data?
Your notes.
Disciplined Plasticity
Little Acorns allies the discipline of a spreadsheet programme with the plasticity of a word processor.
It presents your notes in neat rows.
Lists you query by entering find-as-you-type key strings.
Group under easily editable headings and sub-headings.
But empowers you to sort them on-the-fly.
Drag and drop them into permanent order.
Print them out as a coherent whole.
Copy them to your word-processing package as a cohesive document.
All via single mouse clicks.
Stop Seeking, You’ve Found
Seek, Find, Store
Both word-processing and spreadsheet packages can perform keyword searches.
Multi-string searches?
Those too.
Provided you engage in a mess of Find panel fiddling.
Figure out which search options to switch on.
Which to switch off.
Are a wiz at conjuring formulae.
Even then, neither package will return matching hits only.
Merely highlight twin strings in your data.
Little Acorns etc.
O, Rocks! Tell Us in Plain Words
Little Acorns empowers you to run a search on a single field – every field in a record list – by entering everyday language.
Be that a single search string.
Or a multi-string search.
And it returns matching records only.
Highlights matching fields within those hits.
Invites you to tag records of interest.
So, compile collections that are a distillate of multiple searches.
Repel Writer’s Block
A Bulwark Against Artistic Angst
Fear facing the blank page alone?
Little Acorns will protect you by conscripting an advanced guard in your name.
A cohort consisting of your ragtag notes.
It will drill them into shape.
Then, detail them to take the bleak white.
A blockade against writer's block.
The Terror! The Terror!
“Blank pages inspire me with terror.”
Margaret Atwood
Little Acorns will dispel this terror.
By sending an advanced guard onto the desolate tundra of blank paper/screen.
A complement consisting of the ideas that came to you when you were in the shower/jogging around the park/changing baby.
Slivers of reference/opinion/insight that struck you as diverting/interesting/essential when you were flicking through that three-volume history/touring that museum/watching that documentary.
Little Acorns will drill this company of unruly recruits.
Discipline them into divisions that will prove indispensable in the campaign to come.
A Flexible Friend That Accesses All Areas
Infinite Capacity
A note may be as long as you wish it to be.
More precisely, as large as your device’s drive capacity permits it to be.
Destined for a lone haiku or latter-day War and Peace, Little Acorns will accommodate the notes necessary to foster any size project.
Corking Good
Little Acorns won’t distract you with text formatting concerns.
Freeing you to concentrate on ordering notes as you might index cards on a corkboard.
Ditto your Beats and Chapters.
Here, however, there is one distinction with the real-world counterpart:
After you're done re-ordering Beats and Chapters, you'll discover that notes filed under them came along on the ride.
In the order you assigned them, of course.
Out Of One, Many
“The secret of getting started is breaking your complex, overwhelming tasks into small, manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one."
Mark Twain
Just as one little acorn may grow into a towering oak, and a lone tree birth a sprawling forest, so a single note squirrelled away in Little Acorns may give rise to an almighty project.
And that project a sprawling series.
Once For Future Or Decisions And Revisions
Enter a note in the application once.
Deploy it numerous times.
In innumerable permutations.
Reconfigurations.
Thumping Bible
Because every note you post to the application will remain in it for as long as you wish it to -
Amendable -
Searchable -
Sortable -
Little Acorns will compile a reference bible for your ongoing series as a by-product.
Sweat-free.
No Note Left Behind
What happens to notes not air-lifted to your word-processing package?
They constitute a cache of potential that may be drawn on in the future.
Extensibility? It's Mr. Fantastic
Export? Witness:
Need to export notes posted to Little Acorns to another application?
Can you paste material from your clipboard into that application?
Then you’ll be able to transfer notes stored in Little Acorns across to it.
Non-fiction No Lie
You’re a non-fiction writer?
Think of Little Acorns as your virtual librarian.
Intern.
Research assistant.
Why?
It's a database application.
Consequently, every word committed to it double-duties as a keyword.
So, every note consigned to it may be isolated.
Referenced.
Redeployed.