Well, it’s November +43 minutes, which means it’s November here on the East Coast (but not that many other places).
The NaNoWriMo website hasn’t yet updated to let us start entering word counts, excerpts, etc., so I guess, to them, it’s not November just yet.
In preparation (heaven help us all), I installed Leopard on my 15″ Powerbook, the computer I plan to be writing on. The new OS is nice. It does some cute graphical things, but my favorite thing (I haven’t tried the built-in backup feature yet) has got to be the “Spaces” function.
Here’s what Spaces does; you have MS Word on a “desktop” and you have Photoshop in another “desktop”. You can set things to default to (what looks like) one of four different desktops and when they open they’ll automatically load to that desktop and hang out there until you get to them.
You can use a Hot-Corner to activate Spaces, which means no keyboard shortcuts (though you can assign a shortcut to it, of couse).
It seems very nice. I haven’t put Leopard on my desktop machine yet, but I’m looking forward to playing around with it there, as well.
There was further preparation taking place this evening. For one thing, I cleared out a lot of junk on my desk. I’m intending to have the desktop machine either off or with the monitors off, while I’m writing, but I’ve cleared some nice space on the desk for parking the laptop. I went through a MOUNTAIN of paper that is now out for recycling.
I also hooked up Guitar Hero III.
Now, that might seem counter-intuitive for a “focus and get stuff done” sort of atmosphere, but let me tell you, a few songs is great for limbering up the brain and the fingers. I suck, of course, and was only playing around on the lowest setting (i.e. “for people in comas or in the other room.”) but I was able to four-star my way through the first few tiers, including the first boss battle.
Let us not speak of boss battles. Let he who’s bright idea this was be struck down at God’s earliest possible convenience.
The last set I did I got an Encore (you get these at the end of each four-song set) and the song was “Paint It Black” by the Rolling Stones. I might not have shared that I’m a Stones fan (I am), but in case you were wondering, that’s probably my favorite band playing one of my favorite songs by them.
It was a good note to go out on.
For what it’s worth, sometimes I use the blog as a way to “warm up” before the night’s work. So you might see nonsensical posts pop up in here from time to time. Some of them might be quick, some of them long. Some might be about nothing at all, some might be reflective and some — very rarely — might actually have something to do with the book.
Right now what I’m going to do is get the file set up on the laptop and see what’s going on in there. I wouldn’t expect an outpouring of literary wonder on my first night out, but it’s good practice, I figure, just to open it up and snoop around.
I have requested a number of folks harass me while I’m undertaking this little project, and some of them were nice enough to start harassing me a couple days early. To make this official; you may now begin the busting of my chops. Feel free to use the Comments system on this page (I think you need to register, though I’m not sure) and follow along on this interesting little journey.
I’m not worried about the quantity of words required for “success” inasmuch as I’m concerned for my ability to focus and actually produce. If I can get a “first draft” onto paper in the month of November, I can use December and January for editing and rewriting. “First get it down, then get it right,” is the order of the day. Let’s see how badly I can screw this up.
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