Archive for November, 2009

My NaNo novel is going better, so far, than any of the previous attempts. I’m over 12,000 words, and I know, sorta, where it’s going. I previously never made it much past 5000, and I never had an outline before, not that the one I have is much of one. But any outline seems to be better than none for trying to mash out 50,000 words in a month.

Of course, at 12,000 words, I’m not on target anymore. I’ve essentially only averaged about 1,000 a day, which is far short of what I need to win NaNo. I’ve got to hit 2111 words a day, now, to win, and I don’t know if I can manage it. It was hard just getting 2000 yesterday. I just have too many projects going, and suffering through a cold for the last week hasn’t helped at all. I’ll have to see if I can pop some extra words out this weekend, but we’ve got projects to get completed around the house, too, so I don’t know how much uninterrupted time I can squeeze out.

I’m satisfied, though, with my progress. Even if I don’t win NaNo, I’ll finish the draft of this novel, as it will still count toward my goal for the next year (yes, I worked out my 2010 goals early) of getting three novels drafted.

“Huh, what?” you say.

I’ve come to the obvious conclusion that, if I want to get better at writing, I need to write. And I think I need to write a great deal, so I’ve set a goal of drafting three novels by the end of 2010. They’re going to be written as practice, with no intention of trying to get them published through a traditional publisher. I may even make them available here, in some fashion, if they aren’t total trash. A friend of mine, back in 2006, did a project he called A Short Story A Day, and this will sort of be my novel version of that project. I’m not about to post as I go along like he did. I’m not that comfortable with my fiction yet, but I may post them as I edit them. We’ll see.

Drag and Drop index cards! Yes, now you can drag your index cards from one spot to another to reorder them. It’s not, perhaps, as smooth as it will be after years of refinement, but it works.

Also in this build, I removed Session word counts and replaced them with “Daily” word counts. I’m a little worried about this one, really, about if there are some of you that actually would prefer a session word count over a daily word count.  Personally, I got annoyed that the session word count would reset every time I closed StoryBox because sometimes, well, sometimes I closed it on accident, or I have to do multiple sessions in a day to get my target. If you want session word counts back, I can put them back in (in addition to the daily wc), just let me know. One other little tidbit about the daily word count. It does not reset until you close the project for those of you that start your writing at 11pm and write til 1am. Your daily wordcount won’t reset on you in the middle of your session.

Oh yeah, if you have documents open when you close a project, when you reopen the project, it will now reopen the set of documents you had open when you closed it.

There are a couple other additions, too – read the release notes on the download page for more information on them.