Chamomile Has A Blog

I have both good news and bad news re:NaNoWriMo today. The good news is that yesterday I was able to get up to 11,561 out of 11,667, which is a few hundred words ahead of the catch-up schedule I set for myself when I fell behind on day six. The bad news is that I have just exhausted my outline. It took me in the neighborhood of 2-4 hours to compose that thing, and while I have some jumping points for another arc, I’m going to need to actually plot it out (I could try to discovery write it, but experience tells me that my discovery writing devolves into meandering incoherence after about 10,000 words, at which point my will to continue the story is badly drained – this might be able to get me to limp across the finish line if I run into this problem again on day 24, but here on day seven I need another outline). That’s about the same amount of time as the Write-In on day four that got me double the words I needed for the day. All of day eight could be lost to outlining just as I’m starting to recover from getting distracted on day six. I may need to write 2k per day for a couple of days to catch up afterwards.

The good news is that I can discovery write for up to about 10,000 words if I have to, which means if this happens to me again in the final days of the month, when there’s not enough days left in November to spread out the damage of missing one, I can just plow ahead with no outline at all.

Today I was easily distracted and reached only 9,143 out of 10,000. Tomorrow’s goal is technically 11,667, but I’m going to aim for 11,143 instead. This is still more than the standard 1,667 words per day, so if I can manage that tomorrow and the day after, I’ll have caught up. This also means I don’t have to commit myself to making up the deficit in one day, which could be bad for morale if I don’t make it. But, y’know, during that write-in I totally got two full days of writing done plus change, so I’m not ruling out catching up all in one day, I’m just not committing to it either.

My laptop crashes sometimes. After a crash, any attempt to start it up again will result in another crash within 20-30 minutes. The machine absolutely needs a solid eight-ish hours to cool off before it can be used again. Geek Squad opened the thing up for me and confirmed that the fan is working fine, so I don’t even know what the problem here is. What I do know is that if the computer happens to crash while I’m writing for the night, it is not coming back until the morning. As such, Saturday’s total was 8,647 out of 8,334. I’m on target, but only because I doubled up during that write-in at the library on Friday. I’m worried these crashes might become more frequent. I anticipated this might be a problem and have been writing in Google docs, so I can access the draft from a library machine if need be, but being forced to write only on library hours could be a serious impediment.

There was a write-in in my town today, where a bunch of NaNo folks go to the library, commandeer a room, and just write for like four hours. This is a very productive writing atmosphere, because my laptop’s unstable and will crash if moved while powered on, which means I can’t get out of a room where my monitor is in plain view of everyone around and I have nude mods installed on every game on my machine up to and including Minesweeper, so I can’t knock off and play video games in the middle of time assigned to writing. Upshot: I’ve got 8,390 words written out of 6,667.

So there’s this website called 750words.com that I have a grandfathered free membership to. You write into their word processor and it tracks how many words you’ve written with the goal being to write 750 words a day. The problem is, it expects you to use their actual word processor, but their word processor is awful. It exports things as .txt files with the line breaks removed and no italics or bold, and digging up previous days’ work in the word processor itself for direct copy/pasting requires using a clunky interface that requires loading a new page every time you want to scroll back a month, so God help you if you’re trying to dig up some stuff you wrote back in 2013. I just use Google docs to write and then copy/paste things into 750 words. The problem with this is that 750 words cuts you off at exactly midnight, which means if I’m writing late at night (as I often am) and realize that the deadline is in two minutes, by the time I’ve logged in, figured out where the last day’s writing left off, and copied all the new words from my main document, the hour has passed and the whole day is marked as zero words. The subsequent day then gets to have doubled up words, so weekly and monthly word output is still recorded accurately, but the actual 750 words per day streak is not. I’m considering switching over to copy/pasting the previous day’s work right after midnight, since getting it in at 12:10 instead of 12:05 won’t ruin everything the way getting it in at 12:00 instead of 11:55 does.

Also, I’m at 5,314 out of 5,000 words today, and the actual word writing got done before midnight (with time to spare), so I’m good on that front.

November second’s total wordcount was, technically, 3,020 out of 3,334. In my defense, I did get myself over the finishline within an hour of midnight. The problem with that metric, of course, is that it might keep me on track for wordcount when I wake up the next morning, but it won’t work on November 30th. When midnight strikes and November ends, I either have 50,000+ words or I don’t.

Yesterday, got up to 1786 out of 1667 words. There was a literal eleventh hour sprint to get it done after I’d spent something like 3-4 hours staring at a blank page and not knowing how to start. I had a full outline and everything. Just didn’t know how to introduce my protagonist.