It is both a bug and a feature of self-imposed arbitrary deadlines that you can arbitrarily move them yourself. Right now, I’m choosing to regard it as a feature, and am extending my deadline to 14 December. Thus I am now participating in what could be more accurately titled along the lines of “NaNoWriMo-and-a-half”.
It’s still not going well.
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Unfortunately, this attempt to write my fantasy novel in a month isn’t going well. In my experience, there are two critical things that you have to do in order to produce written material at a good rate:
I’m planning to write a fantasy novel this month, using NaNoWriMo as a kind of inspiration. I don’t plan to actually register, and what I’m doing isn’t quite the same—I’ve got the bulk of a plan written already, and I’m aiming for sixty thousand words, two thousand words per day, instead of fifty thousand words. The novel I’m writing is one whose first chapter came to me in a dream, and which I’ve been trying to wrangle into a novel for a while. I won’t post daily progress updates—those would be pretty boring—but will probably do them weekly. Hopefully this will be an easier process than editing the second draft of my science fiction novel, which I did in November 2007 and which was one of the most difficult things I’ve done.
It took me a while to get there, but I now have a working toolchain to automate going from an RTF file (or a Word document) to reStructuredText. The final link took the longest to find, and turned out to have been right there all along (no, I’m not going to turn this into a retelling of The Alchemist). But if you’re interested in how to get from Word to a sane format (like reStructuredText), this post will interest you.
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I always thought that the explosion of personal writing (email, instant messaging, blogging, microblogging) as the internet has gained acceptance would of necessity lead to an improvement in writing skills; it’s difficult to see how a massive increase in the amount of writing people do would fail to have that impact.
Indeed, the Stanford Study of Writing documents just such an improvement, as Clive Thompson reports in Wired. (Via SarahM.)
Despite voice communication, video, and online gaming, the internet is still primarily a text environment, and will continue to be so. The technical restrictions that forced it to be almost text-only at first may have been around just long enough to force a sufficient mass of people to use text and realize how powerful and efficient a medium it can be—a realization limited to a vastly smaller number of people in the pre-online era.
Via Greg Costikyan comes The Nemean Lion, a very short text adventure. I find it interesting partly because it’s somewhat like microfiction, and because it plays with the form somewhat.
While I’m here, I should also mention Hamlet—The Text Adventure, which I’m rather fond of (and which is a signficantly larger game, although probably not huge by text adventure standards).
I capitalize the title of my blog posts (evidently), which means that five days a week I get to consider precisley how to do that. Often, as in today’s case, it’s simple and doesn’t require any thought. But sometimes it does, and—worse—sometimes it does but I don’t notice.
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At the start of the year I laid out some goals for 2009, and it’s time to review how they’re going.
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I tend to care about word count in my writing. I’ve never been paid by the word, but nevertheless, it matters to me. From time to time I write fiction where I set the word count in advance, and then I try to hit it precisely. Even when that’s not the case, I just like to know how many words there are in a piece I’m writing. For this reason, a "word count" function is completely critical to me for whatever word processor or text editor I’m using to write.
jEdit has such a feature. It’s more or less the same as the one that I’ve been using in AbiWord, and in various word processors before that. But for quite some time I’ve wanted a better word counter. Since jEdit is now my application for all writing and I can script for it in Python, it was time to make the word counter I wanted.
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I’ve written before about my wish for semantic word processing tools, and two years on I still haven’t found something that suits me. I think that WYMeditor has definite promise, but unfortunately the authors are aiming that at browser-to-server functionality, rather than in-browser standalone functionality. This isn’t such a major obstacle for me, but it is one of the reasons why I’m hesitant to move over to using a project that hasn’t reached version 0.5 yet.
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The The New York Times tennis blog mentioned DFW’s “String Theory” essay the other day, bringing to my attention the fact that it’s available online. I loved it when I read it in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, and highly recommend it. David Foster Wallace wrote a number of truly excellent pieces on tennis, and all of them are absolutely worth reading. Here are those that I could find available online:
Unfortunately “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart” doesn’t seem to be available online. It’s not about tennis in the way the others are, but it’s a fascinating look at the mentality of high-level athletes. It’s in Consider the Lobster, which is also full of other excellent essays.
This is the thousandth published post on this site. It’s not the thousandth blog entry per se, since some of the entries on this site predate the blog (some predate the site itself, and indeed my awareness of the web). Still, it’s a fairly major milestone, and (working off a suggestion of Jeff’s) I used Wordle to create a kind of commemorative graphic.
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I made a WordPress page containing a list of all the fiction I’ve published on this blog. I had to do this by hand, because it appears difficult to get a reasonable list using various WordPress approaches (such as tags). The page I created is hardly a masterpiece of user interface design (I hope to improve it significantly over time), but it’s better than what was there previously.
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I’ve been reading a lot about this recently. I’m not sure why, although some of it is due to looking around for info around when I was coincidentally writing up my Fantasy World Sketch. Some of it is due to just happening to run into the edges of a larger discussion taking place mostly on LiveJournal.
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This evening I was asked a few times about whether or not writing was fun, and why I write. I’m not completely sure about the answers.
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Mozilla Labs recently introduced Bespin, a browser-based fully-featured text editor. I have mixed feelings about this, because I wonder if the time would be better spent working on other things (or improving other editors), but on the other hand I like the idea of a text editor written using languages that web developers can tweak, and being in the browser offers a tremendously rich framework for layout and presentation. I also wonder if it might lead to the kind of semantic “word processing” tool I’ve previously mentioned looking for.
I’ve been sick as a dog since New Year’s Eve—not the best way either to greet the new year, or to travel—and my writing has suffered as a result. Despite extending December by five days, I’m still not going to finish the novel plan in time, and don’t feel confident about any major progress in the next few days… so, back to getting half a chapter plan done per day, which should polish off the remaining 6.75 chapter plans by 18 Jan.
Hopefully I’ll feel better by then, too.
Happy New Year!
That’s goals for the year 2009, not two thousand and nine goals, people.
I tend to start the year with a bunch of ambitions and projects—many of which I even accomplish. Some of them for this year follow.
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