The first day of NaNoWriMo is finally here. I started writing after midnight, before I went to bed last night, and I’m just sitting down to continue now. I’m a little late getting home, as I went to the climbing gym tonight.
I’m using the free Q10 as my word processor for this month. It was recommended to me by Amanda (her fiance, actually), and it’s really working for me. It’s a very simplistic text editor that has a few handy features:
No installation required. It’s run from a self-contained executable, so you can toss it on a memory stick with your novel and take it anywhere.
Run at full screen, allowing you to focus on your writing free of distractions.
Set a word count target. You can set it for your month or your day goal, and it will display the percentage completed at the bottom of the screen.
Set a timer. This is one of my favourite features. Once the time is up, it will display how many words you wrote during that period. I plan to set it for 30 minute intervals, to remind myself to stop and stretch every now and then. Having a timer while you write tends to keep you moving at a fast pace.
Auto-save the document at a customizable interval.
No distracting red and blue lines under your mistakes that will awaken your inner editor.
Display multiple word counts. I use one for overall word count and one for daily word count.
Insert notes into the document. By started a line with “..”, it sets that line as a note. You can bring up the list of existing notes whenever you like. This will be really useful when you go back to edit next month. The notes do not count towards your word count.
Just thought I’d share this with you. I’m off to write now!
The NaNoWriMo website appears to finally be functional, so I thought I’d drop in here and point you to my profile. If you’re taking part this year, add me as a writing buddy. I don’t know what writing buddies do, exactly, but if nothing else I can spy on your word count like the big voyeur I am.
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A handy tool, if you’re planning your NaNo digitally, is FreeMind. It’s a Java-based mind-mapping program that’s quite easy to use. I’ve been experimenting with it while sketching up characters and trying to tie together some sort of plot. I think I prefer to plan on paper, but this is a great alternative.
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Suzie at Words, Words, Words makes a good point about the daily word count goal in her Ten Tips for NaNoWriMo post:
1667 words a day. That’s actually not a lot. Rather than say to yourself I am going to sit down from 7.30-9.3pm every night you should grab every spare minute you have. This is more useful if you have a laptop - you can write in coffee shops whilst waiting for someone, or on the bus on your way to work. Even if you have a desktop computer though, every time you get a spare ten minutes write a couple of paragraphs. They all add up.
1667 words a day really shouldn’t be too hard to hit if I can manage to just write without looking back. I won’t edit, I won’t stop to find the perfect word, and I won’t even reread what I wrote. Just dump the contents of my mind onto paper and then get on with life.
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In the comments for Suzie’s post, Jessica had this tip to share:
The article suggested using a spread sheet program for your outline. In column 1 number the scenes, in column 2 tell what chapter(s) the scene appears in, in column 3 tell the point of view character of the scene, and in column 4 describe of the scene.
I really like this idea. When planning a story, I tend to start by coming up with a lot of random scenes and trying to piece the them together afterwards in a logical order. This will make shifting scenes in the outline a lot easier.
This has been a fairly eventful and mildly exhausting week, but I’m sitting here in my freshly cleaned apartment on my freshly formatted computer drinking my freshly brewed cup of tea, so I feel like my life is shifting back to order quite nicely.
Last week, in a fairly spontaneous decision, I bought a new computer. I’ve been using an aging laptop for a few years, and I felt it was time to bring my desktop back from the dead. I didn’t want to pay for another computer case, or the service charge for the store to put it together for me, so I just ordered each component and built the computer myself. Unfortunately, everything arrived last week except the CPU. I had to leave the city for a few days, so I had a half-assembled desktop waiting for me at home, calling out while I was gone. It was very hard to concentrate.
Friday morning, at the ungodly hour of 5:00am, I got in a rental van and drove to Seattle with a group of developers from work. We were there to attend the No Fluff Just Stuff Java conference. I’d never been to a software development conference before, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. I figured it would be a weekend of mildly interesting presentations, and that would be about it. I was very happy with the high quality of the speakers there, and the talks were very helpful. I was introduced to a few technologies I didn’t know anything about, and I learnt a lot of better programming and project management practices. I came away from the conference full of enthusiasm and as a slightly better programmer, which I wasn’t expecting at all.
On the way back from Seattle, I ditched my coworkers and went to Vancouver. A friend of mine was visiting, and she had a free ticket for The Smashing Pumpkins concert on Monday night. I was there for two days, so when we did a few touristy things: Granville Island, Stanley Park Aquarium, getting completely lost. It was a lot of fun.
The concert was great. I used to be a big Pumpkins fan in high school, but I hadn’t really listened to any of their new stuff. The two new members of the band seemed like decent musicians, but they had no stage presence at all. They just rocked back and forth and looked very uncomfortable. Also, apparently a crowd surfer died a few metres to my right during the concert, and I didn’t even notice. That’s a pretty good example of how I tend to walk through life - utterly oblivious.
When I arrived home, all the parts to my new computer were waiting here for me. It’s now together and, friends, it is glorious. Bioshock looks fantastic on it.
The last fews days, I’ve been struggling through a task at work. I’m going to finish it over this weekend. It’s something I estimated would take a day, and it’s been dragging on for a week now. Once that’s finished, I’ll really be able to relax.
Here’s a song from Zeitgeist, the new Pumpkins album. As a whole, the album is a little underwhelming. It’s decent, but it seems a little weak for a comeback album.
I’ll be in Seattle this weekend for a Java conference, and then off to Vancouver for the Smashing Pumpkins concert on Monday night, so there might not be too much action here in the next few days.
I ordered a new computer this week, and it just arrived today. I wanted to use my existing case, so I decided to just order the parts and put it together myself. I only had enough time tonight to clean out my old computer and mount the new motherboard, so it’s just sitting there in a pile at the moment. I am, however, typing this post on my shiny new 22″ widescreen LCD monitor!
When I ordered the computer, I didn’t know about the conference or the concert. I was originally planning on buying a lot of food on Friday night and playing games straight through until Sunday. I wasn’t even going to put pants on. I feel like there’s a universal conspiracy keeping me from my new toy.
Oh well, off to bed. In order to make it to Seattle in time, I need to get up tomorrow morning at 4:30am. I haven’t gotten up that early for two years, and I’m not really looking forward to it.
I know a few of my friends aren’t yet making use of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds, so I thought I’d write a little post to help drag them into the 21st century. Even a programmer friend of mine, a technically-savvy individual, is still using bookmarks for his news sites and comics. Bookmarks! How embarrassing!
If you frequent more than three websites, you should really be using RSS feeds. For those who haven’t heard of it, RSS allows websites to publish content to feeds that can be monitored for updates by feed readers (aggregators). If this seems confusing, don’t worry - you don’t really need to know how it works, just how to use it.
As an example, if you add looselogic.com to your feed reader, every time I write a weblog post it will automatically display in your reader as an unread entry. Once you’ve finished reading it, you can mark it as being read, much like you would within an e-mail client.
The first decision you need to make when choosing a feed reader is whether to use a web application or a local application. I prefer to use a web application for this, since you can access it from any computer and keep your settings. With a web application, if you mark everything in your feed reader as read at home, when you check it at work those entries will still be read. If you use a local application, you’ll have to install it on each computer you want to use, and they won’t be synchronized with each other.
The two web applications I’ve used are Bloglines and Google Reader. I started with Bloglines and recently moved over to Google to give it a try. Both applications are great, but I like how Google only marks the posts you’ve scrolled over as read, where as Bloglines will mark the entire feed as read as soon as you click on it. Luckily, you can export your feeds, with any directories you’ve created, into an OPML file that can be imported into other readers, so trying a few different applications is fairly painless.
Below I’ve listed how I’ve set up my RSS feeds, to give a better idea of their utility.
Announcements
Feeds of news releases from various companies.
Comics
The web comics I read. Most websites these days have both their comics and their news postings on the same feed.
Cooking
Cooking-related feeds. Mainly food weblogs that post recipes every now and then.
News feeds from gaming sites. Gaming news, reviews, announcements, trailers, demos, etc.
Literature
News feeds from, you guessed it, literature-themed sites. Random literature articles, book reviews, writing tips, that sort of thing.
Loose Logic
The feeds from this very site. One for the posts, just to monitor them, and one for the site’s comments.
Music
Music news and weblogs.
News
World and local news. Still trying to find the right sites to use for this, to get the most news with the least amount of spam. BBC News and CBC are two good starting points. Both sites offer a full list of feeds, from headlines and world news to local and special-topic news.
Personal
All of the non-commercial, variety weblogs I frequent and Twitter.
Personal Development
Do It Yourself, personal finance, and life hack sites. Any of that Getting Things Done, personal development hogwash.
I wouldn’t typically have the time to read everything listed here. I’ve often, in the past, set up a similar schema using bookmarks, but it was just too cumbersome to browse through all of these websites once a day. Since setting them up using RSS feeds, it’s a breeze. I check it a few times a day, read everything that’s been updated, and I’m all caught up.
RSS feeds save me a lot of time, and I’m constantly finding more uses for them. If you subscribe to a useful feed that I haven’t mentioned, let me know!
Q10
I know a few of my friends aren’t yet making use of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds, so I thought I’d write a little post to help drag them into the 21st century. Even a programmer friend of mine, a technically-savvy individual, is still using bookmarks for his news sites and comics. Bookmarks! How embarrassing!
