Re: NaNoWriMo

Antti <antti-juhani@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Tina Hall kirjoitti:
Antti <antti-juhani@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

That's pretty close to counting words. You'd have to look for
newlines (and perhaps tabs) as well as spaces, and you'd have to
count multiple spaces as one. The result may be off by one or two,
but that doesn't matter in (non-drabble) fiction.

It's less problematic than that. Tabs, fortunately, are ASCII
character 9, not " ". I don't do multiple spaces. I don't
know why newlines would be a problem, as mentioned I add a space at
the end of a paragraph which stays to be counted.

Ah, but I was talking about how to count words *without* doing the
space thing you do :)

I wouldn't know how to find words. (And I don't want those counted that
are separated by tabs, as that's just stuff for me to find something,
including viewpoint, day-since-start-of-story, location, and time.)

Of course, if it works for you, don't fix it.

[...]
Ok, yes, that would make the web awkward, though I wonder why you
can't do in OS/2 what you'd do in Windows (for looking at websites).

There's a dialler called Smartsurfer, only for Windoze, which finds the
cheapest rate for any given time (they're usually 3 hour periods, after
which they revert back to 2.99 cent per minute, as opposed to 0.24 cent,
for example[*]). Finding my way manually through the multitude of
different, and regularly changing, rates for Internet-by-Call would be
even more bother.

And once I've got a number and data to enter, I'd need a dialler,
browser, and whatever else for OS/2.

With a flatrate, of course, that jungle of rates would vanish. But for
that there'd have to be a flatrate (for normal phone and internet) that
doesn't mean I'm paying more than I do now.

[*] So you get (numbers made up but reflecting real ones) company X from
8:00 to 11:00 for 0.24 cent per minute (outside that it's 2.99 cent),
plus a dial-in charge of 9.98 cent, and company Y from 10:00 to 13:00
for 0.26 cent per minute (with, again, 2.99 cent outside that) plus
dial-in of 9.90 cent, and so on. The ones that stay for 24h without end
tend to be close to a whole cent per minute, not that I want to be
online for that long.

Yeah, though it wrecks the "1000 words a week" schedule, as I'm not
a fast worldbuilder :)

Well, I'm not a 'do <this much> in <that time>' person, so I have no
idea how to adjust your method to take in the changes. I wonder why
not write when you feel like it, and then look at the result and be
happy about that. (Different mindset.)

I don't have a method, I have a madness :)

Heh.

I'm hoping I might have refined it to a method after finishing several
novels, but at this point, I'm just trying to find things that work.
Deadlines - when I manage to convince myself of their necessity - work
for me, but they only work when the deadline is close. Hence, I need
to set frequent deadlines with modest goals attached.

As long as it works out the way you want, that's a good thing.

My problem is that I'm a geek of all trades, so I have too many
interests. At any given point in time, I'm working on one specific
project, and there are many other projects shouting at me "work on
me, work on me!" And while I can get back to a software project
fairly easily without having to start over, it doesn't work for
fiction (at least in the first-draft stage that they all are in): if
I swap out a fiction project for any significant time, it dies and
when I get back to fiction writing, I need to invent a new one.
Which creates the problem of having lots of dead beginnings in my
files.

Can't you do an hour writing and an hour software project?

I write best when I've got a nice game to distract me. I play an hour,
get bored, write a while (usually more than an hour), reach a point
where the words run out, play again for an hour, inspiration hits me, I
get back to writing, and so on.

This doesn't, unfortunately, work with rasfc, because (I think) I'm
reading and writing here, too. A similar activity, when I need a
different activity for my thoughts, like wondering how to best arrange
items (like farms, shops, whatever) in some game. (I like games where I
can build something. And before you suggest windoze games, that doesn't
work because it needs a reboot, too. I've tested just that lately. The
game has to be available by just opening a DOS fullscreen and starting
it, and the text has to be available by just switching back to the OS/2
Systemeditor - what I use to write stories.)

Putting something together with Quick Basic (like a cheat) has an equal
value of distraction as playing has, and is fun. I just don't know
enough to make my own game, unfortunately. (What I'd really like is
knowing how to program in C.)

This means that to keep a fiction project alive, if I take a day or
two to do some other project, I need a deadline to remind me to get
back to it soon.

Understandable in the circumstances.

So I'm having to go back and figure out why anyone would volunteer
to crew a one-way expedition where they arrive at the destination,
if at all, when they're old enough to retire, and this means I have
to actually figure out what the socioeconomical situation was on
Earth at launch. I was hoping I could handwave that stuff, as it's
all offstage :)

Hm. No storage, or speeding up the trip, I suppose.

???

People storage, like cold sleep, or arriving sooner, so they aren't all
old enough to retire when they arrive.

My initial worldbuilding ideas tend to come from Things I Want To Do
Different, and then that just grows.

My initial worldbuilding is generally at a conceptual level, without
much detail. I'm learning[*] that this doesn't actually work very
well, and the world details (not just the world concept) affect story
and characters.

[*] I've known it intellectually for a long time but now I'm really
*learning* it.

Hm. I'm not sure I can follow this. What would a concept be, without
details? (I'm asking for an example so I know what you mean, not how
could it possibly be that.)

The world of Starbirds came from two different sources: I continued
poking at the concepts of my last year's NaNo world, and started
thinking about some socioeconomical issues of slower-than-light
starflight; then, this summer, I've actually started *noticing*
birds[*], and it occurred to me what an intelligent bird would be
like. I created a locale for the birds and installed, using the
colonisation thoughts that I had developed earlier, human colonists
on that world to get a human perspective on the stories.

That doesn't sound any different than I do it. :) Different bits put
together.

[*] This coincides with my recently started walking program, for
reasons that I hope are self-evident :)

Not really. What's a walking program?

Another trouble I have, for both worldbuilding and storybuilding, is
that everything is fluid: as long as I am not actually *writing* the
story, nothing is set in stone and everything can (and does) change,
which makes everything mushy and insubstantial. Another point of the
wordcount goals I'm trying to set myself is to force myself to
actually decide stuff, as I'm trying to work with the idea that
everything that's in the draft is, while the draft is not complete,
immutable.

I tend to think it is, but then find the most unsuspecting thing to be
not quite as I thought. :) By now I'm expecting that. (I think I
shouldn't; it's lazyness, in a way, because clues turn up this way, too;
something innocent mentioned early on turns out to have a Meaning.)

And of course, after about 3k words, I hit a snag and recognise I
*have* to undo some of the changes made in those 3k words.
Aaaaaargh.

Sounds familiar. :) (I've found myself undoing changes done because I
had thought something didn't fit and had tried to force an answer, and
then the answer came on its own, matching what was there before.)

But still, expecting that doesn't seem a good idea. I have to find the
place (in my writing attitude) where it's accepted (a step back), I
think.

--
Tina
WIP: Space: 5514 words
WISuspension: Seasons & Elements trilogy | Magic Earth series
Posted to Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.sf.composition.

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