NaNo Progress report

[ellenmillion]

I have finished the body of the novel! 2900 words today (more than half what was left!), and I am about halfway through the epilogue. I will run out of story about a thousand words before I hit 50K, I think, in just under 2000 words. I have plenty of things to go back and fill in, so I have no doubts about getting to 50.

I haven't read back through the full thing yet - I'm half looking forward to it and half dreading it. Once I get the magic number, I'm not sure if I want to go back immediately and start the finishwork, or if I should set it aside for a while and come back later with a fresh view.

What a fascinating journey it's been...

Scrivener for Windows (beta) is an interesting program, but I am doubtful I will continue using it - it has a lot of formatting weirdnesses: among other things, it doesn't recognize some very common contractions, and it notes spelling errors with the squiggly underline in a plus or minus two-word distance, and it has this 'invisibles' thing that randomly HIDES big blocks of text and causes me panic thinking I've lost chunks of my story, and the line breaks don't work out neatly between it and open office. I don't think I'll be paying for it, though I do like the chaptering feature and the as-typing wordcount.

Short week coming up - complete with predictions of freezing rain. UGH!

47201 / 50000 words. 94% done!

Comments

Yay!

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

Congratulations on your progress!

Re: Yay!

[ellenmillion.livejournal.com]

Wheee! Thank you! I'm excited by this one - it was very unusual working from an established world backwards to how it was created, and it was a challenge working in so many details that weren't originally my own.

Re: Yay!

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that can be quite an adventure.

Me, I'm used to working out of sequence. I'm lucky if I can get a character to stay in chronological order within a single story. There's often at least one scene that has to be moved -- and if I'm lucky, I'll catch it before I finish the draft.

Working with other people's ideas can be fun. I'm enjoying the audience interaction in my Origami Mage series of poems.

[laylalawlor.livejournal.com]

Oh wow, congratulations! And you did it *fast*, too! :D That's completely awesome.

I'm currently stalled out at about 25K words. I'm still definitely interested in writing the characters, but I can tell that if I keep writing without investing some serious effort in plotting, I'm going to have to rewrite the whole darn thing at some point, and I think I'd rather spend the extra time to get the basic points of the plot nailed down rather than having to rewrite the whole thing from scratch. (Of course, *have* I actually been working on my plot? No, not so much, really. *headdesk*)

[jenny heidewald (from livejournal.com)]

Whoo! You go, girl! And so quick! Now, will you be able to get to 50,000 words before the last day? :) I was never able to, and always lost the drive to write once I got a few hundred words above the goal (that was so that any word count variations wouldn't catch me short worded).

I usually never read it again until the next year...

Geeze, where did the month go? I didn't finish the project that I was going to use my time for instead of NaNo WriMo.

[ankewehner.livejournal.com]

I've been using yWriter5. It structures a book into chapters and scenes. (I've been using it for my Flash Fiction, too: chapters "Ideas and Drafts", "posted 2009" and "posted 2010", and each "scene" one of my fridaily stories.)

You can mark a scene as "unused"; it won't turn invisible, just the title gets greyed out.

Words aren't counted as you type, but as you save (but it will display "added today" in the status bar at the bottom of the main window, and it keeps a daily progress log.) I didn't notice anything odd when copying&pasting into or from OpenOffice.
There's also stuff to take notes on characters, locations and objects, and mark on each scene which of those things appear in this scene, and who is the viewpoint character. You can also add summaries to scenes which you can use to generate a summary of the whole book once the scenes are in the order you want them in, though I don't use that stuff much.

The spellcheck is very basic, only marking words it doesn't know, neither offering corrections nor offering to add a word to its dictionary.

[kelkyag]

I would guess that it's worth reading through when you're done, even if you decide to come back to editing another time. Tasty story!

[clare-dragonfly.livejournal.com]

Yay, go you!

Wow, I would have thought they'd get more of the bugs out before releasing the Scrivener for Windows beta. I'm hearing a lot of bad about it, though. I hope this doesn't turn you off Scrivener forever--I absolutely adore it. The Mac version doesn't have any of the problems you mentioned (except possibly line breaks in Open Office; I haven't exported anything since I got Open Office so I don't know for sure).