it's that time of year again

[kittenscribble]

There was a fire drill at work today; we all piled outside and admired the beautiful weather. S___e is in the middle of nowhere and it's absolutely gorgeous, no buildings in sight of my workplace, nothing but winding roads and autumn trees and gently rolling hills as far as the eye can see. The sky was blue and the sun was bright, and even the people who had come outside with clipboards and calculators were kicking back and chatting. A few people even started putting up the volleyball net. Sadly, they called us back inside before we could get a game going.

Anyway, it's the first day of Nanowrimo and I'm at 2156 words already, with a ghost of a plot in my head and a snarky character to play around with. Not bad, all told. (Probably helps that K's been in New York all day; I had all evening to bond with the laptop without distraction.) Props to dokein for finding Willie; it's an awesome freeware that does exactly what I need it to do: monitors my wordcount while allowing me to write in TextEdit. (Thank goodness for barebones word processors; u$oft Word is way too distracting.)

I think Nanowrimo is making me gregarious. It's a funny concept: for a month, participants take a very private exercise (writing) and make it into a very public enterprise. You make much of your writer's block, your plot consistency, your personal struggles; it's made more fun by the fact that tons of other people are doing it with you. No more writing in closed-off rooms; these people like to gather in coffee shops and hear about one another's characters. Turns the normal concept of writing on its head. Brilliant idea, really.

Comments

Willie

[dokein.livejournal.com]

Really, Willie worked for you? All it did for me was bring up an empty translucent window, then shoot an error message at me.

In light of the disclaimer...
Willie.app does not have any documentation, an icon, or is even completely finished (you may notice that if you explore the app a bit). Yet, for a .1 release, it does what it promises.
... I wasn't terribly disappointed, and deleted it.

So why would it work on your PowerBook and not mine? Hmmm...

Re: Willie

[kittenscribble.livejournal.com]

I don't know... it works perfectly well. Did you bring it up when there was nothing on your clipboard? When I launched it, the number displayed was "17" or something.

It does bug out somewhere over a certain number of words (somewhere around 5000), but since I write in 2500 or so word segments, that doesn't matter so much.

Re: Willie

[dokein.livejournal.com]

I tried it again and now it works fine. I like the big bold print and all, but I've found it a little inconvenient to have to copy and click on it to get an update. NanoCount works nicely in the background, keeping the tally for whatever document happens to be in front in TextEdit.