At least one hour per day, I’m required to sit at a phone waiting for a “help desk” phone call that rarely comes, while everyone around me is getting on with their jobs.  That gives me one hour a day to sit at a desk with a pencil and a clipboard full of looseleaf.

I’ve decided to revisit my failed NaNoWriMo ’10 project.  I have a fair idea of where I fell off the rails (which, unfortunately is near the beginning…), but I found what I can salvage, and was able to face my blank sheets of paper with an idea of where I want to go with them.  This is a much better start than I originally had, so hopefully my results will be equally better.

I’m not, however, as brave as some writers.  One of my fellow sailors (although currently posted to a different unit) is also into writing.  He doesn’t NaNo, but he _does_ post his work.  I know he was looking for constructive criticism on at least one project, but be at least somewhat nice – as grumpy as he tries to portray himself, he’s a good guy.

Maybe one day I’ll have something that I feel is ready for the light of day, but my work is currently growing like a mushroom – in the dark, and pretty much full of shit.

I had hoped to play a bit of Portal while I’m stuck on the ship for a duty watch tomorrow.  Unfortunately, I will have to wait until sometime next week.  Guess I need to find some other entertainment for a long, boring day   Hopefully Sea Training doesn’t decide to make it more interesting.

I previously mentioned my plans to make a tool for automating some of the book-keeping involved in a NaNo project.  I then mentioned that the project was to be put on hold.  Now that my family’s health is good, and that this year’s NaNo is complete, here’s my next attempt to begin this project.

First off, I don’t like the name.  NaNo Tools sounds like it’s a collection of small hammers and screwdrivers for making really small things.  Not that this isn’t cool in its own way, but not the impression I’m going for.  I’m currently bouncing between Word Warrior or SprintWriter.  Suggestions are, of course, graciously accepted.

My plans for features include:

Text editing

The primary purpose of any writing tool is, of course, writing.  I intend to have a fairly minimal interface, with very little to get between the writer and the accumulation of words.  Perhaps two views; a pure-writing view with only the text, and a “normal” view, with all the goodies such as menus and toolbars.  Suggestions?

I have a few ideas for improving word-bashing.  For example, if the writer deletes a large chunk of text, it can instead be marked as “hidden”, but still usable for word counting.  I don’t plan on having fancy formatting; maybe bold and italics, but that’s probably the extent.  The goal of this is to make a utility to bash out a rough draft of as many words as possible within a time limit.  Fancy headings can show up during editing.

Another idea, which was brought up at a write-in, was the concept of blind-writing.  In this mode, the interface won’t show what is being written, or will only show one or two lines.  This is to prevent you from looking back and realizing that you made a mistake two paragraphs ago, then breaking your writing stride to go back and fix it.  This mode won’t be the default, but it will be available.

Live Word Count

Most word processors these days have some basic stats on the bottom of the editing window.  For example, OpenOffice will give you the following information:

• Page number / Number of pages
• Page style
• Writing language
• Insert mode
• Selection mode
• Change indicator
• Digital signature
• View mode
• Zoom

I’m sure that all that information is useful to someone, but not to someone who is trying to meet a word-count (and not quality) deadline.  No word count available – not even a character count!  I think that a word count and current goal are definite requirements; maybe both a daily and an overall count.

Daily Word Count Stats

We all like to see our progress marching forward.  NaNo provides tools for you to brag about your progress, and to compare it with others.  Why not see, even when offline, if your progress is brag-worth?  Have you excelled at any point?  Is there a pattern to your writing bursts?  It’s all your writing stats, which may or may not be important to you.

Planning Calendar

How many words per day do you need to write?  Everyone in NaNo knows that if your goal is 50,000, then your daily goal is 1667 words.  What if you’re in YWP and you’ve set your goal at 25,000?  What if you have a week to produce 10,000?

What happens if you have a burst of creativity producing 6000 words in a single day?  Do you want to slacken your schedule a bit for the rest of the month?  How much slack can you afford?  Are you falling behind?  How will your daily goal be affected if you want to catch up?  Need to schedule a day off, or a specific day with a larger goal?  All these can change your daily writing goals.

With the planning calendar, you can see what you did in the past.  You can also plan for that all-day write-in, where you expect to put a few extra words on the computer.  How about that travel day, where you will spend twelve hours behind the wheel, and not be able to write?  Put them all into your calendar, and it will calculate your word count requirements for the remaining days.  It will also adjust future “standard” goals in relation to what you’ve already written – if you’re falling behind, watch your daily requirements rise.  Likewise, if you’ve built up a good buffer, smile as your daily goals shrink.

Word Sprint Tracking

Word war, word sprint, whatever you want to call it.  You’re at a write-in, and someone yells out “30-minute word war, starts in 5 minutes”.  When the war begins, you enter a keyboard command (you don’t want to take your hands away from the keyboard now!  Time is ticking!), and your current word count is recorded.  At the end of the sprint, you press it again, and your word count for that sprint is instantly available for you.  No more messing around with the calculator, or with word-counting a specific region.  As a bonus, you don’t need to break your writing stride at the beginning of the sprint.

I also plan for this to include network integration, as I know that some sprints are managed by IRC or Twitter bots.  That will be a later-version feature though.

Other Ideas

Does anybody else have suggestions?  A feature that you’d like to see, or that you think is a waste?  Let me know.

Also, I haven’t decided yet on how to release it.  Do you think it will be worth paying for?  What would you pay for a tool like this?  Not saying that I will definitely charge for it, but the idea is there.

• The “game over” screen, which will kindly allow you to return to the battle in which you just died.
• A cutscene.

I haven’t done the actual timing or math, but I’m pretty sure I’ve spent more time watching cutscenes than playing.  In fact, as I am blogging right now, a cutscene is playing.  To be fair, I just restarted the game (for reasons that I will explain below), so this is the opening cutscene (which I apparently skipped before).

In the game, you control one of three characters: Terra, Aqua, or Ventus.  Actually, while I say that you control one of the three, during the course of the game you will control all three.  Once you finish the game with one character, you play it again with one of the others, then again with the third.  Only by playing through with all three characters will you get the entire story.

Additionally, I learned (after I started the first time, and the reason for the restart), if you play on the standard difficulty level, you need to find every secret in the game to get the storyline-tying final scene.  I’m playing instead in proud mode, in which I take more damage, but don’t need to read guides to ensure that I find every secret before I reach the end.

I do wish, however, that cutscenes played much less of a role in this game.  Maybe I’m spoiled by other game series (the Half-Life series comes to mind) where cutscenes are either non-existent or play a minimal role in the game.  Oh well; to each his own.

Plan

I did some basic planning, but not nearly enough.  I created a basic character sketch of my protagonist, but that was all.  Even that plan went out my window when I rebooted my project a week in.  My plot was basically created on-the-fly, so scenes that I wanted to include ended up, if they appeared at all, very kludgy.

Pace

For a speed-writing event, pace is important.  1667 words per day is doable, but consistency is also required.  Just because you build a 2-day buffer in your word count does not imply that you can take 2 days off from writing.  This leads to “Oh, I can take an extra day and make up for it tomorrow”, which leads you to being far behind the goal by deadline.

Partners

I did my writing with the HRM Nova Scotia NaNo group.  Weekly write-ins ensured that we had support and competition.  Need a name for a minor character?  Pipe up, and a half-dozen suggestions are there.  Need a nudge to get you over a word-count hurdle?  Call for a word war, and let the sounds of everyone else’s furiously-clicking keyboards inspire you to race.

Paper

Yes, most writers today use the keyboard as their preferred medium.  However, a stack of paper is also a useful tool.  I tried to keep track of major plot points using a local MediaWiki installation, but Alt-Tabbing got old, and usually got in the way.  Add to that the change of keyboard focus, as well as multiple clicks required for updating information.  Paper is much more convenient for planning purposes, especially for anything else that requires even basic art.  Especially at a write-in, where most of us used the laptop’s touchpad as a mouse, computer art goes right out the window.

Proposals?

Put any lessons that you have learned into the comments.

Due to my change of focus, I am currently 15,961 words behind the line.  NaNo stats say that I should write 5657 words a day from now until the end of the month in order to catch up.  To put that into perspective, my best daily word count was 5202 words.  It’s not something that would be impossible, if all I wanted to do was make up the word count.

I do not, however, consider this to be a failure.  In my opinion, the main purpose of NaNoWriMo is not to write 50,000 words of crap.  It is to write, period.  In that way, I consider my NaNo to be a success.  I have written.  I have a workable story, although it needs some major overhauling.  And I have something that I, personally, am proud of.  It’s currently a tangled mess.  It will probably be rewritten almost from scratch.  But it’s a story that has made it down onto (virtual) paper.

As promised, I will make another posting concerning the lessons I learned during this foray into fiction.  That, however, will be a post for another day.

I am currently sitting at a total of 25,895 words, leaving me somewhat (24,105 words) short.  According to my NaNo stats, I need to write 3,444 words per day for the next week.

If it were just a matter of typing that, I would have no problem; an hour a day would bring me beyond my writing goal.  Unfortunately, along with typing is the process of creating, which is where I’m falling short.

I’m not giving up; I am going to see this out until the end of November.  Following that, however, I will write up an article regarding my “lessons learned”, which will be what I see as my requirements for any further forays into the fiction-writing world.  I already have a few notes, but I will wait until after NaNo has completed before I mention them.

While I was walking, I realized that “Good” doesn’t necessarily mean “Nice”.  Angels aren’t all halos and harps; they also have that flaming sword handy for whole-scale ass-kicking.  And the world that my story takes place in happens to be the battlefield for this conflict.

My protagonist can save the world from this battle of the Powers, but it will mean sacrificing himself.  And I haven’t decided yet if he will do it.  I don’t want a happy ending, but whether he sacrifices himself, or the world gets ass-kicked, it isn’t going to be smiles and a party at the end.

Now I hope to actually keep up with my word count.  That means that I need to write 1,667 words a day, which also means I need to actually sit down at my computer and open the word processor instead of the web browser or the games.

Planning.

During my classes, I have quite a bit of free time.  The instructor takes us into the lab one at a time, leaving six of us twiddling our thumbs.  There’s only so much of that time you can use for assignments or review, so I decided to utilize it for planning purposes.  This morning, I wrote out my outline, which is a combination of my original plan (which was only in my head) and my work-to-date (which was done on the fly).

This afternoon, I plan to put a bit more thought into who my main characters are.  Maybe add a few secondary characters with real names, as opposed to the extras in a film – “Bystander #1″, “Warrior #3″, etc.

My two main characters are already somewhat fleshed out, but they will be the first to undergo the overhaul.  Since they are the only two that appear in the first couple scenes, I can use this evening to catch up on my word count.

Speaking of word count, I plan that my new work will go beyond 50k.  However, for scoring purposes I will still count the words I have already written.  This means that I have to get 61k this year in order to make my goal.  After losing a full week, I will have to work that much harder, but I believe it is doable.

I just have to quit procrastinating…