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[inEQUALITY]

I'm at 31229 today. 62% through NaNo, about 30% through my novel as a whole. It feels good to make progress on this. I mean, I actually find myself smiling from time to time; I'm writing a novel, a real novel, for crying out loud! I've always heard about the Week 2 Woes, but if anything, my excitement has only increased. I'm exhilarated to find myself sticking to a schedule, meeting a deadline, and writing a story.

I guess after I've done nothing but let myself down all my life when it came to my hopes and dreams, finally getting solidly on the track towards fulfilling them is what I needed. I may not be a published author yet, but I'll be damned if anyone can tell me anymore that I'm not a writer.

[Darkmere]

I pulled my first 3,000-word day today, bringing my count up to 30,117 words, and finishing Act 3. I managed to boot the scene-stealer from yesterday out of my book for now, but she did blow up a building on her way by. Worth it.

[Skyrunner]

I know myself and that I'm distractable and write slowly, so I'm going for a 30,000 word goal.  I'm at 11,081, aka 4 days behind if I meet my goal today.  So... yeah.

On the bright side I'm learning my way around Scrivener.  It seems very in line with the way I write and edit.  It fits the way I write because I jump around and write the parts I want to first, and its structure helps me stay organized within that.  It fits the way I edit because I like to chop up my stories and delete/move parts at will, and this makes it as easy as dragging a document to a different folder.  Well, and checking to make sure all the writing still matches up.

Scrivener looks very awesome.

[Sappho]

I'm having a small issue with Scrivener, if anyone who uses it might know the answer: I changed the settings so that the default font is Times New Roman rather than that horrid Courier New, but I didn't touch anything else. Now, for some reason, when I start a new document, the ruler is set with the right boundary alllllllll the way to the right of the screen. I want it set at 6", which it was before, but now it doesn't work. I looked back in the settings and the right boundary of the ruler is still at 6", but whenever I create a new scene, I have to manually fix the ruler. Any ideas?

[inEQUALITY]

Wish I knew how to help, but I know zero about Scrivener. All you people and your fancy word processors, I swear.

I still use good ol' 2007 Microsoft Works - yup, not even Office, I use Works - for my story in a single document, formatted to make export to ebook formatting easy to do, and if there's any notes I need to keep track of, I use Word Pad docs. I find other word processors to be too cluttered or, worse, too organized. I just can't stand the way things like yWrite and Scrivener are set up for some reason. Atlantis Word Processor is alright, but it's basically Works+ and I still ultimately prefer Works.

I've considered maybe putting some information into LitLift, not that it's really a Word Processor, when I reread my story to begin the second draft a couple weeks/months after my first draft is finished, so I know what needs to be fixed/what happens when I change something. But that's the most fancy I plan on getting with technology for writing this novel.

Unless you count scraping together some sc-ifi stock photos to make cover art for an e-book version, anyway.

[EnigmaticHat]

I'm having a small issue with Scrivener, if anyone who uses it might know the answer: I changed the settings so that the default font is Times New Roman rather than that horrid Courier New, but I didn't touch anything else. Now, for some reason, when I start a new document, the ruler is set with the right boundary alllllllll the way to the right of the screen. I want it set at 6", which it was before, but now it doesn't work. I looked back in the settings and the right boundary of the ruler is still at 6", but whenever I create a new scene, I have to manually fix the ruler. Any ideas?

Could you reset the settings back to the default and then change the font back to Times New Roman?

[Doomblade187]

I give. My inspiration for story ideas has failed, and I know that If I do push on, I will have little to no direction. I have maybe two thousand words left in my mind, and I will work on other projects in the meantime. I have enough, and I am glad to have begun to write again, though, so this wasn't a total loss.

Note: I will probably still write this month, just most likely on a different project, and I won't necessarily be trying for the goal. We'll see how it goes. Second-person experimentation can be fun. Or maybe I should shift narration perspectives with characters? Who knows. Oh, the boundless ideas!

Oh, and if we're talking about writing programs, I use Q10, with a white on black background scheme. There's no spellcheck that I've gotten to work, though, so it's amusing when you put it into word.

[inEQUALITY]

Huh, I have the opposite problem, sort of. I'm 35k in and I'm actually worried that 100k-110k (by the end of December) might be just a little bit too small of a word count. I have two major plot 'hills' for my story that I've imagined, though it is subject to change as it goes along. My story is sort of sequenced like so:

Beginning -> Buildup -> Rising Action -> Semi-Climax -> Falling Action -> Rising Action -> Rising Action -> Climax -> Falling Action -> End

I'm currently right at the part before the semi-climax.

It's not like it's Epic Fantasy or anything. The plot takes place in a relatively short period of time, with only a handful of major events. The buildup - sometimes fueled by action, sometimes by dialogue, and sometimes by intrigue - to each of them, however, is what takes up most of the room for me.

I don't do more than a paragraph or two of exposition at any time that I know of, and either way it'll be easy enough to weed it out and seed that information along the rest of the prose in less in-your-face ways. I also don't have really any real 'filler' scenes at this point. If there are any that I find when I go back through, I'll make them more relevant or scrap them.

Everything either drives along character-building or plot-building more than the other, though often a bit of both, and the pace of the scene really determines which gear I'm in. It probably also helps that I shift perspective between three main characters between chapters that are all telling different aspects of the story as it develops.

[Darkmere]

Yeah I'd planned to do a five-act thing with consistently rising action such that each new act brought a major plot complication (End of act 1, discover world is a wasteland and meet second main character, act 2 antagonists are discovered, act 3 weakness in survival mechanism exposed, act 4 character is critically wounded, Act 5 escape and heroism) but that's sort of fallen apart as I go along and get more into the story.

Yesterday was kind of a shit day for writing, I stared at the screen for two hours blanking on one scene, but when I finally figured it out I typed up 2,000 words in an hour and a half, then collapsed. I like the way the scene turned out, though, and at this point the rest of my novel is already written (despite act 3 and 4 completely deviating from my notes thus far), I just have to type it all up.

word count right now is 32,785, and I'll hit 35k or more during my regular writing time. I'm almost to the home stretch for Nano, despite the fact that my draft will almost certainly exceed 50k by a decent margin.

[Digital Hellhound]

Wrote nothing yesterday, but 1900+ words today and still a sizeable lead don't make that too much of a problem. I'm afraid there aren't enough words left for everything that's still to come, though. I might have to - *shudder* - continue past November and 50k. But hey, I'm not at all worried about losing steam or inspiration before 50k. It's looking increasingly more likely I am going to win this year. And that feels very good.

[inEQUALITY]

Man today was a doosie. My brain did not what to cooperate. I kept trying to make excuses. I started and stopped more than one scene today. I had to leave them to write in later, so I could find where my brain would finally stop pestering me and let me write. I wouldn't let myself give up, though.

Ended up getting 2073 words in within 2 hours though, so today was... strange for me. A slow start lead to a better than usual writing session. I dread going through that again. It took a lot of effort to motivate myself. I'd heard the quote "A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people," before now, but today I really felt it.

It's not necessarily that it's difficult to write if you're a writer, but it is sometimes difficult to stay determined to write without giving up. For non-writers, its easy to simply give up. They don't have to write. They aren't compelled to do it in the way writers are. I feel like this year I finally crossed that threshold from non-writer to writer, and it feels good.

[Lectorog]

Being a professional is doing it whether or not you're inspired. Casuals only do it when they're inspired. It applies to writing and other forms of art, and pretty much everything.

[Doomblade187]

Yeah, I took a break from my story, thinking it done with. I take a look back- boom, I feel like writing on it again. Oh well, I'll see what I can hit.

[Caz]

Being a professional is doing it whether or not you're inspired. Casuals only do it when they're inspired.

/sobs quietly in the corner with dozens of unfinished manuscripts

[Lectorog]

Being a professional is doing it whether or not you're inspired. Casuals only do it when they're inspired.

/sobs quietly in the corner with dozens of unfinished manuscripts

Casuals can get lucky. There are just fewer guarantees.