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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!

It’s that time of year again. I’m working on getting ready for NaNoWriMo 2009! I’ve been looking forward to it since the end of NaNoWriMo 08.

NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel Writing Month. The basic premise is that you try to write 50,000 words to start a novel, in the month of November. To break that down it means writing 1,667 words a day. For someone who’s not used to writing that seems like a mountain. For someone who’s used to writing a lot in a day that sounds like a mole hill. It really depends on your perspective.

Last year was hard, at the time I was struggling to write 300 words a day and 1667 seemed almost impossible. My wrists were killing me by the middle of the 2nd week. I made it though, on the next to the last day I made 50,000 words.

Unfortunately my procrastination has gotten the better of me, and that draft hasn’t hardly been worked on in the last year. I didn’t realize how much I had been procrastinating on it until NaNoWriMo rolled around again… But that’s water under the bridge, I’ll just have to keep working on it.

For this year’s NaNoWriMo I have several vague ideas, that I’m trying to sketch out where to go on. One of them is a Mary Sue type one. It’s a story based on one of my wilder dreams for a store I’ve always wanted to open. The other ideas fall into the fanfiction realm, and I really would rather avoid fanfiction if possible.

The dream of the store is something I’m never likely to realize simply due to a lack of capital, and a lack of interest in my local area. I would probably have to move to a big city for it to work out and I don’t have an interest in doing that. I’m happy where I’m at because it affords a lot of photo opportunities and a lot of ideas for paintings.

I also doubt that this book idea would turn into something I would want to workout and get published, but that doesn’t really matter for NaNoWriMo… Who knows I might turn it into a podcast? Always a possibility. Might turn the other one into one as well. I’ve heard about books getting published after they’ve built up an audience via a podcast. Worth a try anyway, and it would be good audio editing practice.

That is getting a bit ahead of myself, I have to finish NaNoWriMo First!

Are you planning on joining NaNoWriMo this year?