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Yesterday's NaNoWriMo meetup.
Nov. 9th, 2006 01:19 pmYesterday, being a Wednesday, was a NaNoWriMo meetup day. I got up fairly early and managed to get a good start in on my writing so as to both make the 2500 word challenge for the meeting, and to catch up a bit on my overall wordcount. Catching up was needed because, as yesterday was the 8th, I should have been at the 16000 word mark. Instead I had less than 6000.
Well, it was a good day, and my standing has improved signifigantly:
If I can just keep that up for a few days, I'll be back on track. I would LIKE to have accepted the challenge to make 25,000 words by Sunday midnight, but I'm not really sure I can do that. I figure I'll see how much I get written in the next day or so, and if it starts looking close, I'll take up the challenge. I'm a wimp that way. I hate failing in these challenges sufficiently that if it doesn't look likely I'll succeed, then I don't sign up for them. As such, they may not be the greatest motivator. Then again if I DO convince myself to sign up for one, I tend to try very hard indeed to succeed.
I also learned a few other things about my writing habits at the meetup (and the mini-writing-jam that happened just prior): I don't have any problem writing erotica while sitting out in public with a bunch of my friends. Signifigantly less problems than I had while sitting at the dinner table on the weekend, chatting with my Mom, anyways.
Also, the venerable Betty Boop is just barely adequate for the task of writing text. In order to have better round trip handling of files between my main word processor (Wordperfect 10) and the laptop, I've been using Wordperfect 6.0 on the laptop (the last DOS version I ever got), which is considerably slower and less stable than the version 5.1 which I was actually using back when a 386-SX laptop was cutting edge. Still the 5.1 version can't display any of the ISO-8859-1 glyphs that Wordperfect 10 uses for quotes and dashes, while the 6.0 can, so I'm using the slower and less stable version. (Actually, its concievable that version 5.1 could display them if I loaded a custom VGA font for it, and explained that to the program. I probably still have the DOS software to do all that as well, but I would probably spend all of November getting it to work right, rather than actually writing my novel.)
Its actually a bit of a surprise that I can write out in public with all its distractions, as I've always preferred silence when writing. It seems that random-enough chatter is not as bothersome as I had feared it would be. This makes a new laptop a much higher priority than it had been. After all, there's not much point in having a portable computing platform if one never wants to use it in a setting where its portability is an asset.
Having a faster laptop would be good. Having one with a working battery would be better. I ended up losing about 200 words yesterday when![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
tcaptain inadvertantly hit the power switch on the power bar I was plugged into. Luckily I have the automated backups set to every five minutes (and manually back up every 15 minutes) or I'd have lost a fair bit more.
The actual meetup was as fun as is usual but being a large crowd it was pretty much a mish-mash of overlapping conversations. I'm finding that I'm missing having some one-on-one conversation time with folks. Lately I've been especially missing spending time with Sandy,thebabynancy, azrhey, and of course, denizsarikaya, but that's mainly because they're the ones I've seen the least of lately. Frankly, I'd like to spend some time over coffee with any of my friends. sps? kalkuly? Are you likely to have free time to get together any day soon? Anyone?
When I got home from the meetup I was planning to watch the latest episode of Heroes, as reward for making my quota, but I was just too sleepy. All I did was retype the missing 200 words from memory, transfer the files to my main machine and update my word count on the NaNoWriMo site. I crashed shortly thereafter and woke up this morning with the beginning hints of a migraine. I've taken some AC&C (aka 222s) and had an actual caffinated espresso this morning to resist it, and I'm about to have another. If successful, it should be a good writing day. If not, it may be a bust. So far though, the caffination, aspirin and codeine seems to be doing the trick. Lets hope it stays that way, as I have a bunch of writing to do.
Well, it was a good day, and my standing has improved signifigantly:
| |
10,888 / 60,000 (54,985 +) (18.1%) |
If I can just keep that up for a few days, I'll be back on track. I would LIKE to have accepted the challenge to make 25,000 words by Sunday midnight, but I'm not really sure I can do that. I figure I'll see how much I get written in the next day or so, and if it starts looking close, I'll take up the challenge. I'm a wimp that way. I hate failing in these challenges sufficiently that if it doesn't look likely I'll succeed, then I don't sign up for them. As such, they may not be the greatest motivator. Then again if I DO convince myself to sign up for one, I tend to try very hard indeed to succeed.
I also learned a few other things about my writing habits at the meetup (and the mini-writing-jam that happened just prior): I don't have any problem writing erotica while sitting out in public with a bunch of my friends. Signifigantly less problems than I had while sitting at the dinner table on the weekend, chatting with my Mom, anyways.
Also, the venerable Betty Boop is just barely adequate for the task of writing text. In order to have better round trip handling of files between my main word processor (Wordperfect 10) and the laptop, I've been using Wordperfect 6.0 on the laptop (the last DOS version I ever got), which is considerably slower and less stable than the version 5.1 which I was actually using back when a 386-SX laptop was cutting edge. Still the 5.1 version can't display any of the ISO-8859-1 glyphs that Wordperfect 10 uses for quotes and dashes, while the 6.0 can, so I'm using the slower and less stable version. (Actually, its concievable that version 5.1 could display them if I loaded a custom VGA font for it, and explained that to the program. I probably still have the DOS software to do all that as well, but I would probably spend all of November getting it to work right, rather than actually writing my novel.)
Its actually a bit of a surprise that I can write out in public with all its distractions, as I've always preferred silence when writing. It seems that random-enough chatter is not as bothersome as I had feared it would be. This makes a new laptop a much higher priority than it had been. After all, there's not much point in having a portable computing platform if one never wants to use it in a setting where its portability is an asset.
Having a faster laptop would be good. Having one with a working battery would be better. I ended up losing about 200 words yesterday when
tcaptain inadvertantly hit the power switch on the power bar I was plugged into. Luckily I have the automated backups set to every five minutes (and manually back up every 15 minutes) or I'd have lost a fair bit more.The actual meetup was as fun as is usual but being a large crowd it was pretty much a mish-mash of overlapping conversations. I'm finding that I'm missing having some one-on-one conversation time with folks. Lately I've been especially missing spending time with Sandy,
thebabynancy, azrhey, and of course, denizsarikaya, but that's mainly because they're the ones I've seen the least of lately. Frankly, I'd like to spend some time over coffee with any of my friends. sps? kalkuly? Are you likely to have free time to get together any day soon? Anyone?When I got home from the meetup I was planning to watch the latest episode of Heroes, as reward for making my quota, but I was just too sleepy. All I did was retype the missing 200 words from memory, transfer the files to my main machine and update my word count on the NaNoWriMo site. I crashed shortly thereafter and woke up this morning with the beginning hints of a migraine. I've taken some AC&C (aka 222s) and had an actual caffinated espresso this morning to resist it, and I'm about to have another. If successful, it should be a good writing day. If not, it may be a bust. So far though, the caffination, aspirin and codeine seems to be doing the trick. Lets hope it stays that way, as I have a bunch of writing to do.
