Category Archives: NaNoWriMo

Final Days SALE SALE SALE!

Writer.app has been heavily discounted now for all you NaNoWriMoers stuck at thirty, twenty, or ten thousand words with only days remaining and your eyes bleeding from surfing the web, staring into space, brushing your teeth, or doing virtually anything but writing!

You can now get this amazing application for just NOTHING! Nothing at all! It’s like Christmas come early! Or late, if your local stores have also had Christmas decorations and sales on since August 9th.

I’m telling you, it’s a great way to get that little self-editor out of your head and just let the words pour onto the paper. Or if they’re not pouring, at least they’re being dumped, unceremoniously, onto the paper. One. Word. At. A. Time.

Listen, I’ve sacrificed my NaNoWriMo for your own sake, tweaking the app a little bit to make it that much more pleasant to work in because I knew I’d be eyeballs deep in something else all month (and for the foreseeable future). Please. I’m begging you. Think of the children…

NaNoWriMo Technology Suggestions

Took a look at this thread over on the geared up NaNoWriMo.org site and figured I’d write down my favorite tech suggestions.

It’s basically culling my tools from this post, as well as a few of the general tools from this post:

Writer.app for drafting, Tinderbox and OmniOutliner for thought organization and outlining, Mellel for general word processor formatting when I’m at that stage of the process.

Not that I’ll be doing much during November other than being spit up on, not sleeping, and changing nappies.

William Gibson On Writing the Novel

William Gibson

I suspect that the biggest part of the labor of writing, for me, has always consisted of bludgeoning the editorial super-ego into relative passivity

One thing that I learned from my horrific train wreck of a NaNoWriMo was that very same thing. Each morning, I’d sit on the train, and for the 20-25 minutes I was there, I was to do nothing but write forward. A little like what Writer.app encourages you to do.

Write forward, don’t worry about the little typos, the slips, just chuck it and get going forward… a word takes too long to come to your head, maybe !!!MARK IT!!! and move on, get going with a more accesible one.

It’s a great way to go. Writing the shorter Sane Magazine pieces every week is a little more like Gibson’s feeling about short stories, only with less perspective… because that thing is going out, and it’s going out at a certain time, well, editing and writing happen all at once. Which works (sometimes) for these shorter shots, but would just bog down a novel (say, God Coffee, I Miss You), if you tried the same approach.

NaNoWriMo

I had it as NaNoMo, in the initial post, which has since been corrected.

And I’m all geared up and ready to go, complete with author photo:
View my NaNoWriMo profile

We’ll see how far I get, seeing as I couldn’t get an edit or two to my contribution to Fenway Fiction II (And Here’s Where the Authors Hope to Fill in if the Sox Fail to Have Enough Healthy Players Next Year — pending title, from what I’m led to believe) over the course of two months.

No idea for it, as of yet (well, that’s a lie, but I don’t want to look squarely at that idea at the moment, for fear of scaring it off). Working title is: Finnish Guy with the Funny-Looking Hair in Jackboots.

PS. You can still make me feel all good inside by buying a copy (or seven) of the original Fenway Fiction. This way you don’t feel like a bandwagon-jumper when the second one comes out and all your friends are asking you if you read the first one and you have to sheepishly admit that, no, you haven’t, that you never got around to buying a copy, even though I provided you an easy enough, fully clickable link to do just that.