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I have no excuses for missing posting yesterday. The reason is that I just plain forgot. I’m sorry I did, and I will try to do better… And yes, I am working on it. Posting today is progress because in the past my perfectionism would have kicked my butt and made me pre-post this for Wednesday.

NaNoWriMo Is going pretty well, at the start of today I’m only a couple of hundred words behind where I should be starting at. Which is excellent considering I was a day behind where I should have been when I started yesterday. Amazing what 15 minutes at a time can do.

The story is coming easily. I’m amazed at that because I started with such a rough outline. It gives me hope for some projects that have outlines just as unpolished. After NaNoWriMo is over I have a new website that I will be diving into, as well as a new feature for this one. I hope that applying what I’ve learned during NaNoWriMo will help me to work faster.

What all have I learned? That I don’t have to plan in as much detail as I used to think I did. A simple, rough, outline is enough for me to get started. The next step is the rough first draft. That’s something that is stated on almost every writing blog, and book, out there. It finally made sense to me this time, and it’s extremely freeing. I didn’t realize how much pressure that I was putting myself under to do something in one, or two, drafts.

Focus is another thing that I’ve known for a long time I needed to work on. An I’ve known how to do it, but until now I’ve never worked as hard as I am on applying it. It’s paid off with rich rewards so far. I’m getting more done than even when I first started on the FlyLady system. An I’m getting things done that I hadn’t dreamed of ever finishing. (Mmm…… Sounds like fodder for a future post.)

I think one of the next things I need to work on writing wise is endings… (If you see something else I need to work on, please post a comment below and I’ll get right on it.) I always have trouble with them so more often than not I end up just not finishing whatever I’m writing…. I believe this will take awhile.

Take care ya’ll,
~Crystal

The last few days I’ve been feeling pretty crummy so NaNoWriMo has been a struggle. Hence the lack of post Monday. I did manage to keep up with the minimum daily goals, and maybe a couple of hundred more except for last night. I was only about 50 or so words short, but finally got too sleepy to write about midnight.

I’m finally feeling better today so I wrote most of the morning, as well as most of the early part of the afternoon. As of the time I’m writing this… About 4pm central US time. I have 18,907 words. Phew… It seems like a lot when you write it out like that but when I look at the page count it’s not so much.

I’m having to get back into really bad first draft mode…. It’s very hard for me to not go back and correct spelling errors and other things. Even with the spell check shut off in open office it’s extremely hard to resist.

I am ahead in one thing, for once. I already have one book ready to review for the week.. Now if I can get though a couple of more for the Clear off your shelves challenge. I’m going to try and burn though some of the smaller books I’ve had on my shelves for awhile. That way the easy books are done and I can start digging into the thicker books, like Perry mason mysteries, and so on.

Pretty much all my other projects are at a stand still due to NaNoWriMo other than the purple and black scarf I’ve been knitting on since last year. I lack about 6 inches and I’ll be done. The reason the scarf is taking so long is that I got bored with it due ot the length, and it’s supposed to reach from finger tip to finger tip. Which means it’s going to be approximately 5 ft 11 inches, give or take a bit. (Provided what I read about the length of your arms finger tip to finger tip when spread are equal to your height.)

That’s about it… So break time is over, back to work on NaNoWriMo! How’s your word count comeing?  (If you’re not doing NaNoWriMo, what current project are you working on?)

On a whim I decided to switch from Microsoft Word XP To Open Office on my main computer.  I’ve been using open office on my MSI Wind since I got it. It loads quickly and runs smoothly even with Firefox running in the background.

So far I’ve been really enjoying it.  It loads documents noticeably faster than MS Word XP.  It will open MS word documents, so I haven’t lost anything. Another bonus is that it saves in Open Document Format, which a lot of programs can open.

My favorite part about it though, is it’s free. I could say the same about google docs but I prefer something on my hard drive for now. I’m still stuck with the mindset of  a dial up customer. That my internet is likely to go down at any time.  So, I’m not ready to go to cloud computing just yet.

I’m using open office for my NaNoWriMo writing this year, and so far no problems. I am going to make a back up every night of the file, as I’m not sure how well Open office will handle large files.  I doubt that it will have any problems, but better to make sure.

Writer is the only part of open office that I have used so far. I’ll try the other parts of it as I go along. PowerPoint is the only other part of office that I used on a regular basis. I use it as a make shift card file for my Petz 4 Game to keep track of the different pets, and what other pets they’re related too.

I took classes on Excel and Access when I was in vocational school,  and I’m interested to see how much of that translates over.  I’ll probably put up another post when I get a chance to try it.

NaNoWriMo News

I’m currently at 3,507 which is over the day two goal of 3,334 by 173 words.

It’s going a lot easier than last year because I have a better idea of what I’m doing.  The hardest part is not going back to edit the spelling when I make a typo. The point is to get a rough draft, not a polished piece. It is something I didn’t have as much trouble with last year.

Another problem, is that it’s dialog heavy, so far. I haven’t been putting in much information about the settings that you’re in.  I’m going to have to go back and add in some extra detail. Good for the word count, but bad for the time taken. I’ll have to be careful to put that in the first time through in the upcoming chapters.

I hope things go smoothly for those of y’all trying NaNoWriMo. If you’re looking for a nano buddy follow me on twitter, and add me to your NaNoWriMo.Org buddy list. My ID there is stancymckatt

Happy writing, I hope you have a great week!