Faded Boxers

NaNoWriMo

So I done gone do something stupid and signed up for NaNoWriMo like I mentioned here.

In case you were wondering, NaNoWriMo means National Novel Writing Month. I’ve been hearing about it for the past couple of years, but I’ve been too chickenshit to actually sign up.

And how’s my progress so far? See for yourself.

Pretty pathetic I know, but just the thought of having actually started work on my “novel” gives me a small amount of comfort.

As far as the story goes, I already have a loose idea on where I want it to go and what to do with my characters. I guess my biggest problem right now is how to make things interesting between the beginning and the end. I think the trick is to just write as much as you can and worry about the syntax, grammar, and punctuation after. Which is easier said than done if you’re like me who likes to procrastinate by incessantly proofreading all of the two pages I have so far.

At the rate I’m going, it’ll take a miracle for me to actually finish by the end of the month. If that’s the case, I’ll be just happy to have a few pages of not so derivative dribble which I can add to in next year’s NaNoWriMo!

Still, whether procrastinating or actually writing, I’m having fun, which is probably the whole point of this exercise.

So what does Google Docs & Firefox 2.0 have to do with any of this?

Well since I like to squeeze a little bit of writing when I’m at work, and saving my work on my flash drive every so often gets tedious, I decided to try out writely.com (which is just a non-geek name for Google Docs.) It’s actually pretty neat. It’s Microsoft Word which you can access from the web. It may not have all of the functions as its desktop counterpart (on the fly spell check for instance), it does a neat job of making my work available to me from anywhere that has an internet connection.

And thanks to Firefox 2.0, I get to check my spelling as I type.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I got a load of procrastinating to do.