Day 16

Mood: Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
Words: 2,016

Had a nice meet-up yesterday with Dan, fellow NaNo-er and stay-at-home-parent. We got in 90+ minutes of writing above and beyond the enjoyable conversation.

I wrote longhand (no laptop here). Not my preferred method. I applied some analysis to reevaluate.

On the positive side, it slowed down my thinking resulting in better words and fewer passive sentences. I wrote about 1,200 words or 400 per 30 minutes, slower than typing even for me.

Then it needed typing into the computer. A plus to that is I added another 800 words as I filled out ideas, sentences, descriptions, and dialog. Yes, I know the word for that is editing.

Since my handwriting makes chicken scratch look like John Hancock calligraphy, there were some moments of wondering: what the heck is that word? Hand cramps versus carpal tunnel is a wash.

I think I'll stick with the computer.

In the category of more cool stuff those crazy NaNo-ers are doing, click here for a graph of various writers' word counts. The chart of statistics is here (my secret agent code name is 'Aught5').

What is amazing is how the data is gathered and updated. There is a thread in the NaNo forums for this graph. Anyone who replies to the message has their user ID associated with the thread. A program gets the user ID's automagically and then gets the recorded word counts for each from the NaNo site. Pretty darn cool.

I guess that XML stuff is useful.