On Writing and Storytelling: An Unexpected (But Minor) Setback

Thursday, April 23, 2026, Orlando, Florida

It’s a warm, sunny, and unmistakably humid spring afternoon here in Central Florida. As I write this, the temperature sits at 80°F (26°C) under partly sunny skies. With humidity hovering at 48% and an east‑southeast breeze of 9 MPH (15 Km/H), the air feels closer to 85°F (29°C). We’ve already hit today’s forecast high, so with any luck the mercury will start drifting downward as the afternoon leans toward evening.

There isn’t much headline‑worthy news today, but I did run into an unexpected snag in my ongoing quest to rebuild my creative toolkit. I’d planned to finally purchase WriteItNow 6 — credit card ready, nostalgia for my old WriteItNow 5 CD-ROM fully engaged — only to discover that the Ravenshead Services Limited website had gone dark. The order page was grayed out, and a blunt message greeted me:

This website is not currently available.

Not exactly the cheerful welcome I was hoping for.

It’s not a catastrophic setback, of course. I can draft manuscripts perfectly well in Word, and I’ve already resigned myself to Kindle Create’s quirks for formatting. Still, WriteItNow had features I genuinely liked — especially the Storyboard, which made tracking progress on big projects like Reunion: Coda feel intuitive rather than chaotic. I also used it as a secondary backup system, copying each Word chapter into the app as I went. Losing that workflow stings a bit.

At some point, I’ll need to hunt for another writing program that’s both affordable and friendly to the way my brain organizes stories. For now, though, Word will do the heavy lifting, and Kindle Create will handle the publishing side when the time comes.

Conclusion

Today’s little detour is a reminder that creative work often depends on tools that can vanish without warning. But the work itself — the stories, the characters, the worlds we build — doesn’t disappear just because a piece of software does. So, I’ll keep writing, keep adapting, and keep moving forward with the tools I have. The words still get written, one way or another.