Crackle & Bang

Today’s adventure was the trip south to Charlotte, North Carolina and the Carolina Renaissance Festival. That meant loading everything up in the car and the first test run of  my mobile writing platform. My setup consists of my iPad 2 running Plain Text, and a bluetooth keyboard. Nice, sweet and simple. The biggest drawback is the lack of a way to mount the iPad so that it stays upright where I can easily see it during the drive. And no, I’m not the one driving. But other that that difficulty, it worked like a charm. Plain Text syncs via Dropbox to put the words I’ve written on the road back onto my laptop, and then Scrivener syncs them back into my master manuscript. The other drawback that the system has is that I can’t see how many words I’ve written until I sync the words back into Scrivener. I managed to write 1998 words while out on the road today, so when I did my sync up, I wrote a few more paragraphs to round things out at 2148 words for the day. Now my novel is 44% complete, with 22212 words written.


22212 / 50000
(44.42%)

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Chaotic day today. Spent most of the day packing and getting ready for our trip down to the Carolina Renaissance Festival and our Viking Raid on points south. Unfortunately for me, this also meant a trip back into my work because I’d neglected to turn in my time sheet the day before. Time sheets go in on Wednesday of next week, the day we’re driving back from Atlanta. So my choice was either don’t get paid or take a run back in. Getting into work while rush hour was busy taking everyone away from work should have been easy. It wasn’t. Traffic was horrendous, and for some reason my GPS kept trying to steer me back into the one stretch of road I knew was at a complete standstill. After much driving around in circles, and a fair bit of driving off into the darkness not knowing where I was going I managed to arrive. Something like three hours of driving, for a 10 minute errand. Yuck. After a late dinner, I finally got a chance to sit down and start writing. It wasn’t a very productive day, but I did get some words down. Not quite my target 2000 words, but I did get 1771 more words written, taking my accumulated total over 20,000 words!


20064 / 50000
(40.13%)

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After grabbing a couple of hours of sleep, I was able to get up and get myself into work today, so a big chunk of my potential writing time was taken up with gainful employment (What Robert Heinlein used to refer to as “honest work”. Something to be avoided at all costs.). My time after work was somewhat fragmented. First my wife and I had to go inspect a potential storage space in which to store the loot from our upcoming “viking raid” of Atlanta. Then, after we finally located a suitable space that we can actually afford, we grabbed a quick dinner and made our way home. We ate dinner and started to pack for our raiding party… and I passed out. Clean knock out, down for the entire count. no words written at all. So for NaNoWriMo, the day was a washout.


18293 / 50000
(36.59%)

Hopefully I do better on the 10th!

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#NaNoWriMo, Day 8

by Doc Coleman on November 9, 2011 · 0 comments

in NaNoWriMo, WIP

I woke up sick this morning and ended up calling in to work. Then I slept in until something like 1 PM, soaked in sweat. Apparently I spiked a pretty high fever over night. It took me a while to get my brain in order to write, but you can’t exactly call in sick to NaNoWriMo. It just moves on without you! When I finally sat down to write, my progress was slow. It wasn’t until I got over my daily minimum that I started to get on a roll. By that time it was late enough that I wanted to find a place to stop, but each scene kept demanding to be finished. By the time I finally wound down, I had racked up another 2533 words, bringing my grand total up to 18293.


18293 / 50000
(36.59%)

[click to continue…]

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#NaNoWriMo, Day 7

by Doc Coleman on November 8, 2011 · 0 comments

in NaNoWriMo, WIP

Tough day of writing today. Did a full day of work, came home, exercised, showered, got very, very tired, then finally managed to begin writing. The going was slow, not because I didn’t know what happened next, but because I had no energy. I hope I am not catching my wife’s sore throat. I cannot really afford any more time off than necessary. But with my wife’s help making dinner and a bit of dogged determination, I persevered. Final word count for the day was 2025, bringing my total count for my novel up to 15,760! It still feels weird to say “my novel”.


015760 / 50000
(31.52%)

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#NaNoWriMo, Day 6

by Doc Coleman on November 6, 2011 · 0 comments

in NaNoWriMo, WIP

Strange day of writing today. Didn’t really get any long periods of sitting down and just cranking out the words. Most of it seemed to be a few hundred words here and there while waiting between doing this errand and that errand. We got a lot done today, and somehow I manage to boost the word count. I didn’t quite get caught up to where I wanted to be after missing most of my writing hours yesterday, but I did make good progress. [click to continue…]

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#NaNoWriMo, Day 5

by Doc Coleman on November 6, 2011 · 0 comments

in NaNoWriMo, WIP

There is good news and bad news on today’s writing. I had to go out to Baltimore to work a booth at a flea market for a friend of mine. I had thought that I would just be there as a relief person and that I’d have time to write during the show. Somehow it didn’t work out that way. The space we had for the booth was a lot smaller than we expected, and I ended up running a lot more errands. [click to continue…]

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#NaNoWriMo, Day 4

by Doc Coleman on November 4, 2011 · 0 comments

in NaNoWriMo, WIP

In yesterday’s writing, I stopped in the middle of Chapter 4 so that my wife and I could go and get dinner. This turned out to be a good idea for my maternal bliss. And since yesterday’s word count was just shy of 3000 words, not to shabby from a writing perspective.

Today, I finished Chapter 4, then went off to get my own dinner. That was another 1949 words for today. This makes it the first day that I’ve written under 2000 words. Well, we can’t have that, can we?

[click to continue…]

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#NaNoWriMo, Day 3

by Doc Coleman on November 3, 2011 · 0 comments

in NaNoWriMo, WIP

Today was another good writing day. I got in another 2930 words on my novel. So far, my PoV character has been given an ultimatum, been late to his last chance to make a good impression, been thrust into the company any of strangers, been bored by opera, had a building dropped on him, and next I’m going to blow him up.

I think I am getting the hang of this thing. What do you think?

More words tomorrow!

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#NaNoWriMo, Day 2

by Doc Coleman on November 2, 2011 · 2 comments

in NaNoWriMo, WIP

After a truly execrable morning, I managed to find some time this afternoon to sneak in a few words of writing. And I do mean sneak. The events of the morning had caused me to get to work quite late compared to my usual schedule, so I was still at work when my scheduled writing time came about. However, I had already completed about all the work I could reasonably do during the day, so barring someone getting back to me, I had already gotten in my daily production. [click to continue…]

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