Archive for November, 2011

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NaNoWriMo 2011

Tuesday, November 29th, 2011

Yeah, I’m calling it. Time of death is 22,974 words.

I’m going to set This Novel Will Fail (whose secret title is Hypernode) aside for a while, work on Derelict, play some Skyrim, do some reading, sleep, that kind of thing.

So, where to from here? Well, Derelict’s deadline for Draft 3 is December 20, so that’s what I’ll be working on this month. In its current state it’s pared down to not much more than an outline with a few scenes slotted in; yWriter says I need to average about 4k words a day from here forth to hit the word goal, but of course a lot of that is already written and waiting to be slotted in. There will need to be some new scenes drafted – quite a few, actually, as the focus of the book is changing a bit from previous drafts – and a lot of connecting bits still need to be written. After that I’ll be working on Draft 4 from (hopefully) Dec 21 to Feb 20, which is going to be cleanup; there will be a lot of rewriting scenes, fixing the kinds of continuity errors that crop up when you write a book over the course of several years and change the plot direction numerous times. Plus a lot of the current scenes will need to be cleaned up because they’re just not that good, and I left fixing them for a later draft.

I have come to think of first drafts* as the notes from which I will actually write the book. First drafts of stories are very rough for me. I don’t write linearly, so I end up with scenes scattered all over the book, and I’ll write scenes just to see whether they work or not. Then I’ll leave them in the draft, tucked away in the corners, for me to step in later when I’m revising. yWriter’s strength is also its weakness here; its design makes it very easy to write lots of little scenes and squirrel them away in your book, but it’s not as good for taking a section that needs to be complete and just writing through it. What I really want is a way to view and edit multiple scenes or chapters in one editor so that I get the flow as I’m reading through it – like a traditional word processor. I finish reading one scene and instead of breaking myself out to click on to the next one, I just keep reading, fixing things as I go. I can do this by exporting and working in another word processor, of course, but re-importing to yWriter was . . . messy, the last time I tried it. Probably what will happen is, at the end of draft 3, I will export into something like RTF or ODT, and then I’ll do most of the work for draft 4 in OpenOffice. Note that this isn’t necessarily a complaint – yWriter is amazing in a lot of ways, it’s just that it doesn’t happen to be a traditional word processor in addition to a nontraditional word processor. There’s a limit to how much I’m allowed to complain about that, and I think I’ve reached it.

*And make no mistake, with the changes I’ve made, Draft 3 is a new first draft of Derelict. Not the first first draft, but a first draft.

Current music: Same station as yesterday. Still really good. I think it’s time I make a new main Pandora station, where I’m pickier about how much I have to like something to thumbs-up it.

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Oh right!

Tuesday, November 29th, 2011

I completely forgot to include a postmortem on my first day of timed writing here.

Hm. Note to future self: Do not assume that a given proportion of work time to break time is right for you without evidence. You may not have many opportunities to use this advice, but you should nonetheless heed it if you can.

Let’s do a little bit of simple math here. I exaggerated yesterday when I implied that I write a sentence or paragraph on average between breaks. It’s really closer to 300-500 words or so. Typing out a scene of 500 words or so usually takes me, say, fifteen to twenty minutes (if it’s going slow). Then I need a break. As I said yesterday, these breaks should be right around ten minutes, as far as I can tell. (I actually suspect 7-8 minutes might be better now. That’s one of the benefits of having a timer.)

Anyway . . . that math does not work out to 90 minutes of work and 30 minutes of break. It’s closer to 45/30, which sounds worse but shhhh, I’m getting stuff done. The times I locked up worst today were when I tried to force myself to work through the long periods when I’d already used up my 30-minute break. About halfway through my writing time (total, not block) I punched myself in the face and changed what I was doing, because, as it wasn’t helping, it needed to change. In short, I think I can safely throw out two of my three timers, and just keep the 10-minute one I use to keep track of my breaks. I’ll probably still run stopwatches to see how much time I use total in actual writing vs breaks, out of curiosity and because the knowledge might help me, but I’m putting 90/30 to the side for now.

This may all change tomorrow. I mean heck, it did last time.

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November Approaches Its Grim Denouement

Tuesday, November 29th, 2011

Which is to say, I think I’m done writing for the day – probably. It’s going surprisingly easily, for some values of easily, and I have 3500 words down today. This brings my total count to 22486 words, or, you know, not quite halfway there. If I write about 14000 words each tomorrow and Wednesday . . . yeah, that’s probably not going to happen.

So that means I get to pull out the drastic, nigh-suicidal ideas, right?

Unlike today, I have all of tomorrow off. Er, probably. See, I might be getting a call about a job, and who knows how that will affect my day. Hopefully it will complicate, and not simplify, my schedule. Anyway, tomorrow my dear daughter is with her grandparents all day long*, which means that I can probably focus on doing stupid things to my writing hands. My plan is simple. Elegant. Insane.

I shall go to TVTropes.com, and I shall click on the random page button. I will read the trope. I will then write a scene of not less than 500 words using said trope. I will then close that tab, read the next trope that will have inevitably opened, and repeat. Should I ever run out of tabs, I will evaluate the health of my writing hands and the amount of writing I have done, set said evaluation aside, and click the random trope link again.

If you have not heard from me by December, send help.

*Cue maniacal laughter. No, no, wrong track, that’s the hysterical laughter you have there.

Current Music: Pandora station based on She’s So High by Tal Bachman. This station is pure magic. I’m afraid to touch it. Every song that’s come up has been a massive favorite of mine, often long-forgotten. Here, have a list:

Absolutely by Nine Days; All For You by Sister Hazel; There She Goes by Sixpence None The Richer; 100 Years by Five For Fighting; Broadway by The Goo Goo Dolls; Roll To Me by Del Amitri; Push by Matchbox Twenty; Yellow by Coldplay; and Dare You To Move by Switchfoot. Wait, and now Free Fallin’ by Tom Petty.

Yeah, so I thought I was exaggerating when I said that every single song was a favorite. Um. Yeah, no, I totally wasn’t. Daaaang.

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Red Goals and Timers

Sunday, November 27th, 2011

On the recommendation of one of my fellow local NaNoWriters, I recently installed a handy little program called TimeLeft. It’s a very straightforward program; it lets you put little floating timers on your desktop, which stay on top of everything and can easily be dragged to more convenient locations as necessary. It’s a deceptively simple software gadget. I’m trying it out as a means of helping me parcel out my writing time; Lifehacker recently shared a tip suggesting a 90/30 split of work time – 90 minutes working, 30 minutes taking a break. It’s a good idea.

Now, I’ve heard these tips – or versions of them – before. Work for X time, take a break. Use a kitchen timer. That sort of thing. It’s a good idea, and I’ve known for a long time that it’s a good idea, but I never implemented it until now. Why? Because my writing process is constantly in flux.

I know the way I write isn’t optimal — not for me, and probably not for anyone else, either; and I’ve determined, through trial and error, that trying to change everything at once doesn’t work (and fails to do so in a spectacular fashion). Sometimes I try new things and they don’t work. Sometimes I try three new things at once, crash, and throw them all in the bin, only to discover a year later that two of the things are helpful and one of them just doesn’t work for me. (I try to avoid doing the latter these days.) So really, it’s kind of that these tips came back around at the right time for me to work them into my process. And they help.

It’s worth noting that, though the proportions are right, actually writing for 90 minutes straight and then taking a 30-minute break is just flat not going to happen for me. It’s really not. I don’t work that way. I write a paragraph, I wander off and think about it, I write a page, I dig out an iron vein in Minecraft, I get distracted and dig out sixty more iron veins in Minecraft, I build a small fortress in Minecraft, I get an idea and write a sentence. That kind of thing*.

It’s really the middle part I need to get under control; I need small breaks in the middle of my writing to refresh my mind, but the benefit plateaus very quickly. Five minutes might not be enough; ten minutes should do the trick; fifteen minutes is not significantly better than ten minutes. The types of games I like best are open-ended games like Minecraft, Dwarf Fortress, Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim, Fallout: New Vegas, The Sims**. It’s very rewarding to drop into one of those games for ten minutes and dick around***, and it’s very, very easy to accidentally spend six hours instead.

So: Timer. Check it. I set the writing timer for 90 and the break timer for 30. Any time I take a break I pause the one and start the other, and vice versa. Because I want time to play Minecraft later, I keep one eye on the timer, and after around ten minutes I pop out, with twenty more minutes if I want to stop and read an article or something later. Alternately, I set a third timer for ten minutes and run it alongside the break timer. Or, I lose track of time and use up all of my break, and now I have to write for seventy-five minutes straight. I’m still working out the bugs in the system.

Breaks, it should be noted, are mental health breaks – reading articles, playing minecraft – not things like stretch or bathroom breaks. (For those, I pause both timers.) Also, 750words counts as a writing activity, as do blog posts. Basically, the point of the writing blocks is to get rid of the writing portion of my red tasks.

This leads incredibly un-smoothly into my next bit, where I idly list my red tasks; the tasks I set to priority 1 (color-coded red) in Remember The Milk. The red tasks are the ones I try to finish before noon, and the ones that I won’t let myself play Skyrim until I’m done with them. Like, at all. Yeah, it’s pretty harsh. Right now the list looks like this.

  • Write:
    • 750 words unfiltered (at 750words.com)
    • 500 words public copy
    • 500 words pay copy
    • 500 more words pay copy
    • 1667 words on This Novel Will Fail (right now, I’m aiming for a lot more than that); this can overlap with the 500 tasks
    • Daily word count in Derelict (it’s alright if this is delayed until December)
    • Write one chunk of game design or background. I have this listed as about 500 words, but experience shows it to be closer to 250 – I’m actually going to change the tooltip on it right now.
  • Do a load of dishes (best done while Summer’s awake)
  • Do a load of laundry (best done while Summer’s awake)
  • Caffeinate (this part is really important, and, yes, sometimes I’m derp enough to forget)
  • Check email and clean out inbox (first thing in the morning, usually while my tea water is heating)
  • Usually, cleaning one of the rooms in the house (today is the living room)

This is obviously rather specific to this November. Right now it theoretically involves writing somewhere between 3000 and 4000 words, depending on whether I do any drafting in 750 words, whether I write a blog post, etcetera. Realistically it involves much more than that; I have 17300 words on This Novel Will Fail, and four days left. I’ll let you do that bit of math. Pray for me. Cast a spell. Send cookies. Do whatever it is you do. :)

The general form of the red list – that is, during months when I’m not trying to kill myself – looks a bit like this:

  • Caffeinate
  • Check email and clean out inbox
  • Write:
    • 750 words unfiltered
    • 500 words public copy (may overlap with 750)
    • 1000 words pay copy (may overlap with 750)
    • 1500 words current novel (may overlap with 750, 500, and/or 1000)
    • 250 words/1 chunk game design (may overlap with 750, 500, and/or 1000 if prose)
  • Perform 4 general and 1 specific household chore (often dishes/sweep/vacuum/laundry/room)

Which means on a general day I’ll get a decent amount of housework done, write somewhere from 1750-3000 (or more) words of various types, drink coffee, and check my email. These are my before-noon tasks, which gives me about six and a half hours to get it all done and be on schedule – noting that it’s not the end of the world if it takes me until sometime in the afternoon, it just means I’m probably not emptying Google Reader today.

Unrelated: The time is now Oh God O’Clock in the morning, and I missed the ding at the end of my writing timer on account of it blending into the music or something. Bugs, I tell you. Working on them.

* This all assumes that I’m doing this during a time when Summer is asleep. She usually wakes up around 7:30, and can generally be persuaded to take her morning nap about ten, so on a good day I can probably get two writing blocks in during the morning. Realistically her morning nap is unreliable, so if I get a second block in I can roughly double the amount of time and halve the productivity of it because I’ll be busy entertaining/feeding/cleaning/chasing Summer.

** It took me forever to realize that that’s not a vastly disparate list of games at all, and that the factor I love about them is the open-endedness. Sometimes I’m thick that way.

***Except for The Sims. Ten minutes is almost long enough for your save to load in that game.

Current Music: Cake’s albums Comfort Eagle and Fashion Nugget, with a bit of Three Doors Down before that because the albums together come to about 85 minutes. I basically love every song on these albums. Every song on these albums is on my favorites list. Er, no, wait, now Cake is over and we’re on to Billy Talent I and II, all of which are also on my favorites list. Going to bed now.

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Depression: This Is So True

Saturday, November 19th, 2011

I’ve been meaning to link the latest Hyperbole and a Half post for a while. Here you go. I’m guessing most of my followers are already familiar with Hyperbole and a Half, but if not, go click through some of the Best Of links. Unless you’re short on time, you won’t regret it.

I mostly wanted to link this because it is so, so incredibly true, and Allie does a fantastic job of describing what is fundamentally pretty damned complicated. Like me, she had basically no good reason for getting depressed, which is honestly pretty irritating. I haven’t yet reached the point of the depression magically going away – not exactly – but it has been letting up quite a lot, and I honestly can’t say why. I’m tempted to say that the fact that I’ve been writing more lately is part of it – I’ve been getting more writing done again since before NaNoWriMo – but, well, I’m not entirely convinced that I’m not writing more because I’m getting less depressed. Maybe this will all be clearer in retrospect.

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Bloody November

Saturday, November 19th, 2011

So shortly before the start of this month, I published a rather daunting list of things I have going on this month. Seeing as how we’re around 2/3 of the way through the month, this seems like a pretty good time to follow up with a post on how it’s all going. Give me a moment while I open up the old post . . .
Right. My goals, in the original order:

Write About 1667 Words/Day on This Novel Will Fail (NaNoWriMo)

This is the main reason I haven’t updated about November before. I think I’ve mentioned in the past that I don’t really enjoy talking about stuff when it’s not going well, but seeing as how this is a tendency I’m trying to get over, here goes.

The truth is, this is actually going very well.

That statement needs a qualifier or two, though. See, I’m way behind on NaNoWriMo right now. Way, way behind. As of the end of yesterday, I had 16.5k words written. As of the end of yesterday, to be on schedule, I *should* have had 30k. So there’s a difference of about 13.5k in there somewhere. How many words I need to write per day depends on how you interpret the deadline – yWriter5 tells me I need to write 3043 words/day, while NaNoWriMo.org claims I need 2805. I like the NaNoWriMo version, as it seems to interpret the last day of the deadline as a day on which I can write; I suppose yWriter is basing its number on the assumption that there might be an editor expecting to receive a manuscript on the last day of the deadline, which is fair.

But tangents aside, I’m about 8 days behind on NaNoWriMo, with twelve days to catch up. Can I do it? Sure. Will I do it? God knows. I sure as hell don’t. Will I be upset if I “fail?” Hell no. Part of the reason I planned such a stressful November for myself was to push my limits, to see what I can pull off. Another reason was to try and break me out of my bloody long block on writing in general, and Derelict in particular. Both of these have been rousing successes. Earlier this month I blogged that I had broken my previous all-time-high word count by about 1-1.5k when I clocked in at around 3500 words at the end of the day. I didn’t blog about it last Friday, but I hit a little over 5k words that day, which breaks my old new high by a similar margin. This is a big deal for me. Several other local NaNo-ers I’ve talked to say that they usually have at least one day during NaNoWriMo where they hit 10k. This feels like a thing that could happen to me. Bearing in mind that this time last month I considered 2k/day something I could probably eventually reach, but didn’t expect to get much past that, this is a huge deal.

So: NaNoWriMo. I’m way behind, but win or lose it’s been a huge success this year. Moving on.

Write 1 Chunk of Game Design (or something) Each Day

On target. I’d be somewhere into next month if I let myself mark off future tasks as done here, but that would defeat the point. Pip and I have been making huge strides on Zosias, mostly regarding spellcasters and spells. For the first time in about five years, Zosian spellcasters have one master list they can refer to when selecting their spells, instead of around six. (There are good reasons it’s been a mess for so long, but that’s beside the point. Also, in my home games there’s still the 3.5 Spell Compendium, Complete Book of Eldritch Might, Arcana Unearthed, and Arcana Evolved: Spell Treasury to dig through, but that is truly beside the point.)

Read a Book Every 2 Days

A little behind – either 3 or 6 books behind, depending on how you count it. I added some “finish a book” tasks on various odd-numbered days to bring my total count for the year up to 100 if I get it all done. I am not in the least bit concerned here – my behindedness here is basically a fundamental property of Skyrim coming out and Minecraft hitting 1.0*. Since I plan to read through the Chrno Crusade manga again soon, which is seven books long and likely to take me an afternoon or so, I actually count this as on target.

Obtain a House

Failed. It turns out that the fellow who pre-approved us for a home loan was incompetent or something. Luckily my realtor wasn’t, and with the help of her and a banker friend of hers, we found out that he actually couldn’t finance us before we were out a thousand dollars or so on inspections and appraisals, which was preferable to the alternative. This was actually a bit of a relief, because the process of getting a house is pretty stressful. We’re going to wait a year or so, until we’re in a better position, and try again. We should be in a better position by then, because there is reason for tentative optimism in:

Look for a Job

As noted above, tentative optimism. The job market is definitely a hell of a lot better than it was when we moved up here . . . two? three? two years ago. “A hell of a lot better” is not necessarily “good,” but still.

Continue Being Summer’s Dad

Rollicking success. Summer still exists, I’m still her dad, and we generally get along quite well when I’m not denying her God-given right to as much candy as she believes herself capable of eating.

In Summary

Generally speaking, November is going crazy good, especially considering the daunting list I had going into it. Of my stated goals, I have one fail, one behind schedule but fundamentally successful, and four on target. There’s also my ninja goal of “keep working on Derelict draft 3,” which is mildly suicidal but theoretically on track. I had a 10k day on it this week, which sounds more exciting than it is because the day’s work basically involved slotting 10k worth of useful scenes from draft 2 into places where they would fit in draft 3, and occasionally editing them slightly or making notes for future edits. So mostly copypasta. It’s clear now that draft 3 is going to be another rough draft, with a fourth cleanup draft to follow; assuming that I get draft 3 done by December 20, I tentatively plan to finish draft 4 by February 20.

Well, I’m signing off for the morning. November isn’t going to finish itself. Er, you know what I mean.

*I had my first Hardcore-mode death. I was crossing a frozen tundra at night on the way back to my base while watching Desert Bus, and I stepped in a 1×1 hole with a lava lake at the bottom. It was actually a pretty awesome way to die. I liked that world, but I like this story more.

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Update on Daily Writing Goal

Wednesday, November 9th, 2011

A little while ago, I stated a new goal to stay off the Internet until I had 1000 words written or noon, whichever came first. This goal, as intended, helped a lot; while I haven’t always stuck to it, it’s nonetheless served me well, and I’m getting better at not accidentally opening Google Reader. (I tripped, and my faceplant typed reader.google.com in the address bar. Honestly! Would I lie about something like that?)

For a few reasons, though, I think it’s time to update my goal. 1000 words is rapidly ceasing to be a significant challenge. There are a lot of reasons for this. One is NaNoWriMo (not that you’d know it from my current word count). One is perseverence. One is 750words.com. One is this blog. When looking back at my goal, I realized that its original definition was a bit shaky. Scalzi specified pay copy, and for a good reason: he does a lot of blogging, and sometimes writes some very long posts, but his goal was put in place to force him to get professional writing done. I put in my goal for a slightly different reason: I noticed that I wasn’t doing enough writing, and I was forcing myself to write at all. I should mention that I actually quite like writing; I just happen to be easily distracted by things like Dwarf Fortress, good books, and raising my daughter*.

Well, as it stands, I’m writing plenty. It’s time to update my goal. Now, I like 750 Words – I waxed eloquent about it yesterday for almost half as long as I waxed eloquent about Wordpad – but I’ve come to realize that finishing my daily post to it and marking off one of my 500-word tasks in Remember The Milk isn’t very satisfying. Apparently, my goal was to force me to write publicly, and my brain didn’t bother telling me because it didn’t think it would come up. 750 words is unfiltered journal-style writing, which is good and useful and everything, but is also something completely different from a novel or blog post. The only people who will see it are myself, my wife if she reads over my shoulder, and anyone who hacks into my account. This blog post, on the other hand, will be seen by all five of my subscribers (hi, guys!) and approximately seventeen million of my adoring fans when I publish a best-seller. I thought about dividing my new goal into 1000 words of pay copy** and 1000 words of public*** copy, and allowing them to overlap, but then I realized that anything that qualifies as pay copy is by definition public, so I wouldn’t actually be changing much. Sooo . . .

New goal: 1500 words of public copy before noon, only 1000 of which have to be pay copy. No internet for me**** until I finish it up (or noon). That sounds good.

Current Music: Pandora station based on Bon Jovi’s Living on a Prayer. Right now it’s playing Hurts So Good by John Mellencamp, which isn’t really my favorite song. I don’t dislike it, but I’m looking forward to the station getting back to the really good stuff like Summer of ’69 and Message in a Bottle.

*There’s a balance to be struck here, obviously.

**Pay copy is anything that I might eventually manage to get paid for: novels, short stories, and . . . well, that’s it for now. I need to get a column somewhere or something.

***Public copy is anything that is, or might eventually be, public. This includes pay copy, blog posts, lengthy comments, and more!

****Obviously not no internet. I can’t very well publish blog posts without it, for instance, and I check my email in the mornings to make sure I’m not missing anything important. Pandora is pretty important to my writing process, some days. Mostly I’m just trying to keep myself out of Google Reader, I guess.

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In the Department of No Surprises Here

Tuesday, November 8th, 2011

I’m shifting my personal deadline for draft 3 of Derelict up to December 20, from the original deadline of November 20. When I made the Nov. 20 deadline a while back, I had forgotten about NaNoWriMo. Boo hiss etcetera.

This doesn’t mean I won’t be working on it this month – I have it open now, in fact – it just means I have more time to devote to NaNoWriMo.

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Software Gadgets

Tuesday, November 8th, 2011

I recently came to one of those realizations that can only be described as a “duh” moment. I’m a huge fan of software gadgets. I used to think that my obsession with finding and trying out new bits and pieces of writing-related software was a problem that was hindering me actually getting work done, but I no longer think that’s the case. I think that finding new and interesting pieces of writing software actually helps keep me creative. Plus, many of the tools I use constantly were – obviously – discovered by my tendency to tinker around with new software.

In some ways, I’m the software equivalent of that guy with a shop in his garage full of half-finished projects. I’m not an especially good programmer, mainly because I haven’t focused on it much in the past few years, but I really enjoy programming. And when I have something I want to work on I can find out how to do what I want pretty easily. I <3 the Internet.

Regardless of my actual programming skill, I like the process of putting something together myself. I endured merciless mocking when writing a quick program to generate random ASCII for a scene in my NaNo novel took me the better part of three hours*, because it was more fun to write it myself than to use online tools. By the same token, I have about a third of a bare-bones word processor sitting pitifully in the bottom of one of my source directories. Every once in a while I hear it pitifully mewing at me, like a kitten at the bottom of a well.

This feels like a good time to mention the software I’m using most right now. I’m just going to talk about the stuff I directly write in for now, because the rest is probably worth a post in and of itself.

When I’m writing my books, I use yWriter, which I’ve talked about before. I don’t use its built-in metadata handling any more: I don’t really want to track info about my characters, locations, etcetera in it. Instead, I use Wikidpad for that. I also use Wikidpad to organize everything from characters to session notes on campaigns I run.

When I’m working on Zosias, I use Google Docs: I don’t consider it to be an especially good word processor, but it’s unquestionably a fantastic piece of collaboration software. I often wish it had features like columns, redefining the formatting for styles, and handling large documents gracefully, and I suspect it has a gradual memory leak somewhere, but the ability to work together with other people on a document in real time is priceless.

I recently discovered 750 Words, which I daresay has revolutionized my daily writing schedule. I’ve been using it a whopping five days. The basic idea of it is that writing three unfiltered pages a day is nicely therapeutic and helps prime the writing pumps, and I have to say it works very well. It’s basically cloud-based journaling software that applies gamification to the process of daily writing – the point system rewards you for writing every day and finishing your 750 words without getting distracted, and it has tons of achievements (called “badges”) for things like long writing streaks and consistently finishing under 20 minutes. Instead of counting against the total amount of writing I can get done in a day, 750 Words actually seems to increase it; I get all the other stuff that’s on my mind written out, and then I’m good to go.

Finally, and perhaps oddly, I use Wordpad constantly. I prefer the older Windows XP version of it to the one with Win7 on my laptop, because I don’t like the spacing that the new one applies automatically; luckily, my desktop still runs XP, so it all works out. I’ve been laughed at for using Wordpad as recently as just the other day, and there’s no doubt that there are many superior word processors to Wordpad, but it has a few good things going for it:

  • It’s stable. Very, very stable. I’ve used Wordpad constantly for about seven years, sometimes with hilariously large documents, and I’ve never had it crash on me. Never.
  • It’s lightweight. Wordpad does what I need it to: it gives me a great big writing canvas and the ability to bold, italicize, underline, and occasionally change the font and size of my text. It doesn’t try to do much else. If I need to get a wordcount on something, it’s pretty easy to open it in OpenOffice or something, but for most of what I do in Wordpad I don’t need word counts.
  • Because it is lightweight, it’s fast. When I have a quick idea I want to jot down, I do it in Wordpad, because I don’t want to wait for something else to load. I can run a dozen Wordpad documents at once with no performance hit.
  • Its documents are portable. Wordpad saves in .rtf format, which isn’t perfect, but it’s supported by approximately every word processor ever.
  • It’s familiar. I’ve been using Wordpad for various things since I got my first modern computer in 2004, right before going to ASMSA.

This isn’t to say that I wouldn’t consider switching. Things like word count and tabs would be nice, but it’s surprisingly hard to find minimalistic Wordpad-like word processors; most free word processors I run across prefer to try to emulate Word, even when they’re trying to be lightweight. The closest I’ve found is Jarte, which is very good and actually built on the WordPad engine; Jarte is to Wordpad as Notepad++ is to Notepad. And the truth is, I’ll probably switch to Jarte eventually. I had a bad initial experience with it a few years ago, when I was quite annoyed that it seemed to be trying to completely replace menu names with icons – I’ve since found that it’s possible to turn on a menu bar with actual words on it. But I haven’t switched yet, because it still fails the familiarity test. Kind of an odd reason after the point of this post, I know. Every once in a while I switch it to my default rtf editor to see if I can force myself to switch. I think I’ll do that now.

Current Music: A Pandora station based on The Offspring’s You’re Gonna Go Far, Kid. Right now it’s playing Re-Education (Through Labor) by Rise Against. Ooh, no, now it’s playing Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked by Cage the Elephant. I love all of these songs.

*The actual code took about five minutes, but I ended up having to reinstall the JDK for reasons that are too lengthy for me to want to go into here. I didn’t have the latest version of Java installed, anyway. And then I had to figure out why the reinstalled JDK was still trying to use an older version that I had uninstalled a while back, which turned out to be because there were old java.exe’s in my system32 and SysWow64 folders, but I spent about an hour and a half trying to track down what I thought was a registry issue . . .

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A Note on Writing and Gaming

Monday, November 7th, 2011

Skyrim comes out on the 11th. A friend of mine has preordered it for me as my Christmas present. This is incredibly awesome, and based on previous experience with games such as Morrowind and Fallout: New Vegas, I will die of starvation playing Skyrim if I’m not careful*.

The salient point is this: No Skyrim for me on any given day until I’m done writing. If you see me on Skyrim, and a quick verbal or textual interview reveals that I have not yet written, you should punch me. :)

*This happened twice on New Vegas, and possibly as many as seven times with Morrowind. My memories of that period are a bit fuzzy.

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