So +Kay Hill and I are headed off later tonight to a NaNoWriMo kickoff party — an hour or two of chit-chat, noshing on pot luck snacks, and getting pumped up for a Midnight kickoff of National Novel Writing Month, and two hours trying to get ahead of our word count for the first and likely last time this month.
I have my Write-In go bag put together, my playlists ready for playing, my plans for the month planned and prepped.
Let's jam.
For several years I used a laptop and YWriter [1] as my writing tool, with Dropbox as the network sync between my home machine, my Write-In machine, and my (occasional) work machine.
YWriter is a great tool, and I whole-heartedly support it. It's bit less anal than Scrivener (which is still pretty useful), but still provides some solid tools for tracking plot and scenes and characters, etc. But technical and situational problems last year threw that all into a tizzy.
I ended up doing everything through Google Docs instead. It was an imperfect solution — the size of the doc(s) were larger than GDocs works with comfortably, and throwing all that supporting material into other GDocs files for cross-reference was a bit less convenient. But it also meant that pretty much any machine I wanted to use could access the novel, and that was pretty keen.
So I'm going to continue working that way, and now I have a Chromebook for doing the Write-In work I want to do, and PCs with Chrome browsers for every other circumstance. In theory I could even do editing from my phone, though tat way madness and squinting lie.
There are potentially some sync issues if I'm someplace without WiFi. Most places I would be writing, though, do have a connection. And unlike the YWriter / Dropbox combo I was using, the syncing process with GDocs is a lot smoother and more robust, and I can have sessions open (intentionally or not) on multiple machines if need be.
And then all I have to do is write.
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[1] http://www.spacejock.com/yWriter5.html
November means National Novel Writing Month, so I'm starting to gear up for that effort — 50,000 words in 30 days (with a holiday thrown in toward the end just to keep things interesting), or 1,667 words a day.
I think that this year I'm going to go the NaNoEdMo route again and do more edit work on the novel I'm most complete on and have been working on in a writing group, Gunsmoke & Jasmine. The pitch:
If a pair of supernatural detectives in 1952 San Francisco can't find the murderer of minor deity in a seedy bar, it might mean the end of their marriage — and the end of the world! It's up to hedge magician Roger Donne and his dragon-raised Chinese wife, Chrys, to unravel a plot that may lead to the Red Chinese getting the Mandate of Heaven, and triggering World War 3!
Sort of The Thin Man meets Catch a Deadly Spell, with a soupcon of Big Trouble in Little China.
If I finish that needed pass of editing the second half of the novel, then I'll dive into writing what I realize now will be the second book in the series (having already written the second book during an earlir pair of NaNos that will become the third book).
As in past NaNoEdMo, I convert my usual writing speed into time — I can do 1667 words in 90 minutes (based on past NaNo experience), so that's my daily target. It's a bit of a cheat, but the goal of the month is to focus on the writing experience, and this is something I need to focus on.
This will be the eleventh year I've done this exercise. It never gets easier, but it's always a creative blast.
Anyone else out there doing the NaNo thing this year?
