Scrivener is good software but, as you've said, the price-tag is outrageous.

 

My 110k word novel with extensive outlining comes to just under 5MB. I think you're safe. Obviously images are as big as the image is.

 

If any of you won NaNoWriMo, then you should have a 50% off code for Scrivener on your winner prizes page, which is good until April 30, 2013. I might be convinced to give out my code if someone really, really wants it, and I believe you'll use it. Also, the Linux beta is free until January 2014.

For Scrivener alternatives that hasn't been mentioned yet, there's also Storybook, but the free version is missing some pretty major features (e.g. export to HTML). That's a deal-breaker for me, but maybe someone is interested. I haven't tried Plume yet, but I just heard of it a couple weeks ago.

That said, I just use FocusWriter, which is my favorite of the many "distraction-free" writing environments (enembee mentioned a bunch on the first page) since it works and looks the same on both Windows and Linux. The developer recently added a scene list sidebar, which I use quite frequently now. The only thing on my wishlist is support for horizontal rules, though I have my own workaround that works well enough.

I think I'll give Plume a try and Scrivener another try, though. The last time I tried the latter I wasn't really writing very seriously, so maybe I'll find it more useful this time around.

 

For anyone who's interested in this sort of thing, I've spent the last few days experimenting with WriteMonkey's new corkboard feature. It's absolutely superb. I've been working in Scrivener for the better part of this year, just because I find it easier to collate all of my pieces of information, but noticing WM's new features coincided with starting a new piece of short fiction.

This is so perfect for that process I can't even begin to describe it. Fucking sublime.

 

Sorry I forgot to point out. It's only available in the most recent nightly build, not in the LTS stable release.

 

I just tried WM for my anthology entry. How do you export it to Microsoft Office:Word while conserving the format (like italics and paragraph). I found the export option of course, but it always gave me one huge block of text. No formatting what so ever.

 

CTRL+Shift+E -> Check the 'Export to MS Word' option -> Uncheck the 'Save to File'

The rest is just preferences.

It should then open word with your document inside it. If this isn't the case, try a different version of WM, not all of the features are 100% stable in ever release.