Skip to main content

Nano Day 1

Finding time to write is the key, and it really isn't that hard. By some smashing stroke of luck, my dog woke me up at 5:00am this morning, quickly followed by the cat. Unable to get back to sleep I started thinking of my Nano project and the scenes began to flow.

At 7, it was time to give up on any further chance of sleep and get out of bed. Quick packed lunch for my youngest, a bacon and egg sarnie for me, check Facebook (quickly, because I really wanted to write a few notes) and then managed about fifteen minutes writing. Doesn't sound like a lot but it was enough to get about 150 words down.

It's a start.

I work during the week, so I couldn't do anything more until my lunch break. I nuked leftover pasta in a the staff room microwave, found an empty class and began tapping away. I knocked out around 1000 very messy words.

This evening, I managed a bit more time behind the keyboard. This was easy enough - really just time I usually spend scrolling through Facebook and watching videos of cats falling off tables and such. Went over the stuff I'd written earlier and watched a documentary on Victorian bakers, wrote a little more, watched a bit of an old movie, the news and QI. Then an early night and a few pages of current book (Midnight by Dean Koontz).

Total words today - 2168. Not bad considering I haven't really felt like I've had to tie myself to the laptop.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Writing on a Chromebook

I've been playing with a budget Chromebook for the past few months and have to say, a Chromebook is a pretty good choice for writing. I'm using an Acer CB314-1H which cost me a whopping £79 (thanks to a £100 cashback deal). It has a bright, crystal clear FHD screen, a fantastic keyboard (much better than my HP laptop) and it is super lightweight. As far as the keyboard goes, on first impressions, it seems that the keyboard has no delete key or CAPS lock, but both are available with help from the ALT key. It also seems that there is no way to turn the Trackpad off. This takes about ten seconds on Google to enable debug shortcuts, but to be honest, even with the option available, I rarely use. I catch my laptop trackpad all of the time, but hardly ever on the Chromebook. The next thing to consider is software. There's Google docs. You can waste time searching the internet for alternatives, but this means enabling Linux and playing about and it's really not worth it. I man...
Post a Comment
Read more

Rock Music, Stage Diving and a Fire Crew - It's the Clash Launch Party

Thursday 3rd March was one of the craziest nights of my life. Rather than launch the book in a shop or library, I booked a theatre and got local teen rock band, Hell's Marauders , to play. There were a few surprises during the night. The first was the cake Paula had made, with the full clash cover printed on the icing. The second was the fire engine in the car park.The third was being dragged up on stage to sing Anarchy in the UK with the band. I think I might be the first author to do a stage dive at a launch party. The fire crew were there thanks to Nev. Nev gave me some help on a few technical details in the novel. He was on call on Thursday night but wanted to come along, so he turned up in a fire engine with the whole crew. Catnip editor Non Pratt got up to do a truly wonderful introduction, then I jumped up, grabbed the mike and screamed out, "HELLO FATFIELD!" - proper rockstar style! I calmed down enough to do a short talk about YA fiction and a read...
4 comments
Read more

Writing Challenge Day 3 - Back to Scrivener

Sorry Scrivener, all is forgiven. I've actually been using LibreOffice for about a month because I was using for a different project over the holiday period, and generally, everything was fine. But then today, right in the middle of a sprint, it started acting a little weird. I tried to undo a few things only to see it replace chunks of text with error messages. Then it crashed completely. Thing is, this document is less than 5,000 words. That's not a lot for a word processor to handle. And while it autorecovered the file, it's still one too many crashes for me.  Going to back to Scrivener, I suddenly remembered the Session Target tool. This makes life so much easier, as I can see, as I type, my progress. In LibreOffice I'd have to paste the word count into the spreadsheet I'd made.  Project targets window It also displays as a line bar at the top of the project with the Manuscript Target at the top, above the chapter title, and the Session Target below, so there...
Post a Comment
Read more