Yearly Archives: 2007

NaNoWriMo (End of Day 7)

Today was a good day.  The word count was pretty good, but what really made it nice is that the words seemed to flow again.  I guess I just like writing action scenes better than anything else.  I'm averaging about 1100 words per hour, and 2800 words per day.  Which comes out to 2.5 hours per day.  Of course, those calculations take into account Saturday and Sunday, when I put in maybe 15 minutes combined.  An off the cuff estimate would be closer to 3.5 hours a day of actual writing.

I'm using this NaNoWriMo SpreadSheet to track everything.  I wish I could remember where I got it, so I could give credit where credit is due.  If you know where it came from, let me know!

 

NaNoWriMo (End of day 5)

Whew, today was a tough day.  I'm not sure if it was because I pretty much had the weekend of and was having problems getting back into the swing of thing, or what.  I'm still happy with the characters so far, as well as the plot, but each word seemed to be struggle.  I'd get five words onto the screen and then go back and edit four of them.

Still, progress has been made.  I got 2469 words done today, which still gives me an average of 2521 words per day, which is where I had wanted to be.  Still, I've heard about the week 2 and 3 'death marches', and I would really prefer to be much further ahead before any of that stuff hits me.

 

NaNoWriMo (end of day 4)

I figured when I started this that weekends would be difficult.  The kids are home all the time and Marnie is as well.  Saturday has (un)officially become my day to take off and have coffee with my friends for a few hours, but the rest of the day is family oriented.  As is Sunday.

All this sums up to be a slow weekend Nano-wise.  I got exactly 0 words on Saturday, but I managed to squeeze in a couple of hours on Sunday to the tune of about  2777 words.  That brings my 4 day total to 10236 words.  Not too bad a start.

Moral wise, the weekend did bring me down.  Just not being able to get the word count in kinda upset me.  From here on in, I'll take that into consideration a bit more, and make sure I'm right up to speed during the week. 

NanoWriMo (start of day 2)

So far NaNoWriMo is going really well.  I'm still not sure where everything is going, but I'm over 4000 words in on day 2, and I still have a few hours left to write today.

I've introduced the protagonist, a 16 year old girl name Kris, and I'm just about to completely destroy her world.  I probably spent far too many words on description and info dumping, but it all seems okay for now.  I'll fix it all up after Nano.  Nano rule number 1 is no editing.  Get the words on the paper and worry about editing it all later.

If I can keep going at this rate for awhile, I should be ahead of the game once I hit the week 2/3 doldrums.  At that point I'm gonna have to take a day to do some plotting anyway, since I've only plotted about 14 scenes (~ 20,000 words).

I've started using Q10 to do this work.  It's actually not bad.  A nice full screen editor that removes all outside annoyances.  Simply type and go.  It does simple editing, but it's not really designed for that.  I like it.  It's Windows only, but it runs under Crossover Office just fine, except that the real-time stats aren't.

When Nano is done, I'll have to look into writing one of these for native Linux.

edit: Day 2 ended on a bit of a lower note.  I got an excellent word count in, but the last hour was a struggle.  I prob waited to too late in the day to finish up.  I ended up with 4462 new words today, giving me 7359 words in total.

NaNoWriMo

Well, tomorrow is it.  NaNoWriMo starts and my life will get very interesting, thirty days of at least 1667 words a day, to complete at least 50,000 words by the end of the month.  I'm already feeling stressed out.  I was going to take most of October to create an outline and get a good basis for the novel, but that didn't work out too well.  So, in the last two days I've managed to cobble together a rough outline with about 50,000 words worth of scenes.  Out of those scenes, I've done about 1/3 in any sort of detail.  I'll try to add detail this afternoon to the rest, and then the real work begins.

I have some friends that are also doing NaNoWriMo this year.  Best of luck to all of you… I know I'll be needing it.

The NaNoWriMo website is slower than molasses in a Canadian winter (to use a bad cliche), soI don't know if I'll be able to get to itat all for the next week.  We'll see.

Linux and Mac Video Chat

This weekend, on top of all the other things, I tried to get a Video Chat system going with my brother in Calgary.  I thought it would be neat to have him at the family party for the kids.  Well.  Let's just say we need to work on it. 

There are multiple apps that do video chat, MSN, iChat, Skype to name a few.  So here's the breakdown:

MSN: Video on Linux, no Video on Mac
iChat: Not on Linux, Video for Mac
Skype: No Video on Linux, Video on Mac

So there are some of the 'easy' solutions. 

Then we started trying some of the SIP applications.  Our best result was Ekiga(Linux) and xMeeting(Mac).  We had video and voice working most of the time.  But, we could only make a connection with H261, and the video quality really sucked.  Big time. 

We also had partial success with aMSN on both platforms.  Unfortunately, the Mac software needed to be upgraded to work properly, and as soon as that occurred, aMSN refused to sign in to MSN.  Hmmm, what's wrong with this picture?

The end result is… cross-platform video chat is still in the dark ages.  A lot of work needs to be done to get it to work. 

Birthday Weekend is Over

Both our boys have birthdays in October.  Two days apart, in fact, and it can make for a very hectic time in the house.  We had a kids party on Friday with 2 guests for our now five year old, a kids party on Saturday with 8 guests for our now 7 year old, and a family party with 7 guests on Sunday.

Now it's Monday, and it's time to grab the Hoover and clean up after the wild and woolly weekend.

Everyone seems to have had fun though… especially the kids and their guests.  As with all kid get-togethers, we had a few issues.  A couple of the kids insisted on rough-housing, walking on the furniture, etc.  A couple of threats of time-outs brought them back to a reasonable level, I guess.

So, here I am, tired and cranky, and a proud  father to a five and a seven year old.  Go me! 

Holidays and Routines

As I've mentioned in other places in this blog, I really like routine.  I need routine for my daily chores and for my writing.  And nothing breaks up the routines I cultivate better than a holiday.

I drove out to Calgary to visit my bro, stayed there for three days and then drove a rather circuitous route back which took about 20 hours.  While I was there, I tried to maintain my writing schedule, but because of one thing (late nights) or another (food and booze), it didn't work out that well.  I had a blast!

When I got back home, I tried to get into the routine right away.  Unfortunately, a poor critique of a scene in my current novel (which, by the way, I knew was basically a badly timed info dump and needed re-writing) threw me into a bit of a slump.  Falling out of the routine coupled with forgetting 'It's okay to suck' really doesn't help the motivation.

Time to stop the wallowing and get back to work!

 

 

About a month ago, I decided to try my hand at NaNoWriMo.  I had an idea in the back of my head that I didn't want to work on until I finished Anshi, but the timing seemed right.  So, I may not blog at all in November, or I may blog obsessively.  I have no idea.  I spoke to Marnie about it, and she was okay with the idea… even when I told her the house would likely be very messy, and supper would consist of plain rice for 30 days.  Go me!  For those that want to monitor my progress, I'll keep a running counter in the sidebar. 

 

 

We had a visitor the last week or so, which is what enabled me to visit my brother.  Marnie's Mom came over from Saskatchewan for a very nice visit.  I tried to convince her to move in.  I even told her I'd build an entire self-contained suite in the basement for her use.  No go this time, but I think she's starting to weaken!

Life continues…

Talk about a slow blog period!  Things have actually been happening, but nothing really blog worthy.

I managed to get out for a motorcycle ride last weekend… took a long ride out to the Whiteshell area and did some nice twisty roads.  Too bad they're falling apart and covered in potholes and sand.

I'm heading out to Calgary next week.  My Bro is back from his year long sabbatical, and I'm visiting with him for a few days.  It should be fun!  I got him more of this, and as long as he doesn't feed it to me, I'll be okay.

The revision is going well.  I have some slow days, of course.  For example, this morning I only got about 350 words.  On average I'm doing about 1500 words a day.  I'll have to put the revising on hold for awhile due to NaNoWriMo, but hopefully I'll be fairly far along when that starts.