Mark's 20 Percent Time

I said before that I was crazy enough to attempt NaNoWriMo and so it appears that I am. It starts today, but I've not been able to get started yet (it's family time right now," he says while writing a blog post on his phone.)

Maybe a little later today.

In other news, MovableType works, but not exceptionally well, in Safari on the iPhone.

Let me start off by saying that since this is my first serious attempt at writing ANYTHING, my personal goals for NaNoWriMo are: 10k words by the end of the month, and to write at least a little bit every day.

Open Office and the NaNoWriMo page disagree on my word count by 119 words, but in either case, I'm at about 5500 words right now, a bit ahead of schedule, which is good.

However, I am already down by two days toward my goal of writing a little bit every day. The first day was caused by other commitments (see below) which I made up for by writing twice the next day. The seconday (yesterday) I threw under the bus of my personal well being. Between work pages and family waking me up whether I want them to or not (the dogs too; not just Zoe), I haven't been sleeping much lately. So last night I went to bed at 8:30pm and woke up on my own this morning at 5am, an hour before my alarm. 8.5 glorious hours of sleep: precisely what I needed.

So, I've spent the last hour writing before anyone else got it, and got in nearly 800 words, and developed back stories for 7 characters. I'm very pleased with how this mornings writing went.

As for the other commitments I mentioned: I've been helping a friend of mine work on a hardware project involving a tiny surface mount camera, and interfacing said camera to an FPGA. I won't go into the details here yet (I need to get ready for work), but suffice it to say that I finished the circuit and board layout on Tuesday night this week (the first day I missed NaNoWriMo.)

Right. To the day job!

I'm ahead of my word count goal so far at 6855 after tonight's writing session.

Unfortunately, the last two days I didn't write at all, but I blame work. I "worked" from 7am to 11pm in our Scotts Valley office (200 miles away) on Monday, and went to bed early on Tuesday after driving home. So I'm down by 4 days total for the month, with good excuses though. It's not like I'm getting lazy.

...that's my story, and I'm sticking to it...

Having said, that, I just closed out chapter 3 and my brain is mush. This writing thing certainly doesn't come easy for me. Though, I suppose if it did, I'd have started a lot earlier in life. I think I'm going to watch an episode of FarScape or two and go to bed.

Yup, you read that right, I've hit my word count goal of 10k. I've never actually been a writer, so I set a more realistic goal for myself, one that gave me a chance of actually succeeding.

And there you have it, I did.

I didn't do so good on my other goal of writing at least a little bit every day. I probably hit about 2/3 to 3/4 of the days, but there were several days where my schedule just did not permit it, and at least one or two where my energy level had a thing or two to say on the matter. But there were more days where I didn't feel like it, but I did it anyway, and that's what I was going for.

I considered cut'n'pasting my manuscript into the NaNoWriMo validator 5 times to compensate for the fact that my personal goal was 1/5 that of their goal. I hit MY goal and I felt I should get something for that. But, I didn't hit THEIR goal, so I decided against it.

Now. The question becomes, what happens next? I'm only about half way through the outline I already have, which is only about half to a third done. And, the 10k words I've written now are filled with TODOs. Read: There's a crap-ton more work to do on this story if its ever to see the light of day.

NaNoWriMo was an interesting experiment. I'm glad I did it. I might even try it again next year with, say, a 20k word count goal. But a lot of other things have been put on hold for this that I really should get back to. I'm about a year late for some Between The Lines editing, I have about four new computer projects in progress that I really need to get back to, and my Seebeck Clock is collecting dust and staring me in the face every time I sit down at my desk. I'd really like to see this story finished, but it will probably have to wait a while.