NotNaNo '23, Day 7: How is it Day 7 already?

     How can it already be November 7th?

    Shouldn't it still be, like, June or something?

    This year has been way too fast.

    Ugh.

    Anyway, writing was done today, but not really enough.  I kept losing my momentum.  Didn't help that I didn't go to the grocery store yesterday, so this morning I had no caffeine and almost no breakfast, and I had to go to the grocery store first thing before it could get hot.  Because yeah, the weather here slipped back into summer again.  😭  Should move to fall after another couple days, so I guess that's something, since it had briefly skipped over fall to go straight to winter.

    I feel like there was something that I wrote about today that I wanted to share, but now I don't remember what it was.

    Oh well.

    Anyway!

    Total words in work:  272,349

    Words written today:  2,677

    Words written in November to date:  22,349

    Pretty version:

     (Finally with better colors! 😁 )

NotNaNo '23, Day 6: running out of titles already

     I oughta come up with a way to have a blog without having to put titles on posts.  (Though I guess that's not really possible...)

    Today was all right in terms of word count, but frustratingly when I went to check on the contents of an earlier scene, I realized that half of a conversation I wrote was unnecessary and will need to go.  Not because the audience already knows something (technically, they're discussing the motivation behind a mass murder that comes from canon, so everyone reading it already knows the truth of what they're trying to guess at) but because half the characters involved already know, as I forgot it came up in the interrogation of a different character some 30-40k words ago. 😰  My writing method is sometimes very sloppy.  (That, of course, is why I would never want anyone to see one of my works before I've edited it...)

    On the other hand, I had great fun with having Wei Wuxian describe Xue Yang's appearance as "Beautiful, but deranged."  Which made a certain other party in the room laugh, a lot.  (Though it's not hard to make him laugh...)  I felt it was the perfect physical description for him.  🤣

    Anyway.

    Total words in document:  269,672

    Words written today:  3,242

    Words written in November to date:  19,672

    (I really wanted to write a little more and hit 20k, but it just wasn't happening.  And it's best not to force these things, ya know?  (Although if I counted words written in plot summaries, outlines, blog posts and comments on the document regarding changes to make next draft, I would probably be at least up to 21k by now, if not even further...but that always feels kind of like cheating, so I don't want to do that if I don't have to...))

    Aaaaaand I still forgot to look into changing the colors. :sigh:

NotNaNo '23, Day 5: Yes, 5 comes after 4 and before 6

     (Sorry for the dumb title; I started to write "Day 6" and evidently I've gotten a bit punchy...)

    So, today was a pretty good day.  (Writing and doing laundry seem to mesh well, I guess?)  I got over some more of the "I just need these to balance things out and mark that important but boring events are happening" scenes and got to some of the meatier stuff, with more meaty stuff on the horizon (though I need to rewatch an episode or two of the drama first to refresh my memory of how the event was handled differently from the novel).

    Oh, also this happened today:

    I love me a good palindrome.  😁

    Total word count in work:  266,430

    Words written today:  6,783

    Words written in November total:  16,430

    Pretty picture version:

       Hmm.  I feel like maybe the proportions are a little off on that graph.  Maybe it shouldn't be quite that tall?  I suppose I ought to look at the proportions on the official graphs on the NaNo site, for what little that means... 🤔 …and I forgot to change up the color scheme again...

NotNaNo '23, Day 4: 404 Title Not Found

 Ugh.  One of those days.  As soon as I have to leave the house, my productivity is permanently kaput.

I had to go out to lunch with my parents today.  Then watch an episode of TV with them (which they have seen roughly a gazillion times but somehow they think it's worthwhile to sit there and simply watch it again without even doing anything else at the same time) and....ugh.

Day lost.

I mean, it could be worse.  I did at least get in a decent day's writing before I had to leave.  But the fact that I had no choice in the matter is still galling.  As is the fact that I could probably have written twice as much if I hadn't been forced to stop while I still had some juice left in me.

Anyway, I'm posting this on my phone, so I have no graph today.  But I do at least have numbers.

The whole work's total is now up to 259,647, which means I wrote 2,300 words today.  (The even hundred is kinda cool, I gotta admit...but I would have preferred to break 10k today.  Reaching Day 4 without even breaking 10k is humiliating.  (On the first draft of the first Atalanta and Ariadne book, I broke 50k on the fourth day!  Admittedly, on that one I literally wrote all night on the first night and I was much younger then, but still!  (It wasn't even NaNo; I was just that jazzed about what I was writing.)))

NotNaNo '23 Day 3: (insert title here)

     Not a lot to report today.  I didn't really get much writing done because I went out to lunch and a tiny bit of shopping, which completely derails my train of thought. 😭  I did just barely exceed the suggested minimum daily number of words, though, so I guess that's a bit of a win?

    Total words in project:  257,347

    Words written today:   1,863

    Words written in November to date:  7,347

    Ugh, it looks so minimal.  Back in the day, I'd exceed 7k on the first day usually.  😭  Well, I guess I just have to try harder from here on out...  (Of a more pressing concern is that I only wrote one scene today.  And also yesterday, too.  The first day I wrote two.  I have so much in this outline that I really need to be writing at least 2-3 scenes per day...but that'll probably be a lot easier to do when I hit the Siege Hunt at Mount Baifeng.  That'll probably put me back to the level of speedy writing I had on the stuff ending the Sunshot Campaign and dealing with its immediate after effects.  I hope.)

    Pretty chart version:

    

    Hmm.  Actually, that'd be prettier if I changed the colors a bit.  I should do that tomorrow...

NotNaNo '23, Day 2: WTF just happened on my itch.io?

     Part of my usual daily routine is to pop into my itch.io account and see what's happening with it.

    (Speaking of wtf just happened, I just had my "w" key decide to malfunction and send "h" to the browser.  That was the weirdest thing in a minute.  But when I opened Word and tried it there, it was sending "w" as normal, and then when I returned to the browser, it was working again.  But that was really strange.  And alarming.  Decidedly alarming.  (How would I write if my "w" key wasn't working?  Especially when one of my characters has two "W"s in his name?!  (And many, many others have one "W" as well...))

    Annnyway, when I went into my dashboard yesterday, I was greeted by a very strange sight:

    Seems like yesterday (with some overlap into what itch.io considered the day before) someone accessed every single one of my games, ran the browser play on all the ones that had it, and downloaded one of everything.

    It's like...why?

    It just seems so inconceivable that anyone would randomly happen across my page and decide they wanted to play every single one of my games.  They're not exactly, uh, good.  Or unique.  Or even, you know, interesting.  But someone did access, run and download everything.

    It's very weird.

    And maybe it's just my paranoid side, but it kinda feels creepy somehow?  Like are they planning something nefarious?  (I have no idea what, of course.  It's not like it would make sense for them to pirate the games, considering they're all free.  But I'm not sure what else they might have in mind.)

    Now, technically, there's no reason to assume that all of those were the same person.  And yet, given the fact that most of those games get zero attention, going months between page views (and even longer between downloads), the fact that every single one was accessed in a single day does suggest that one person did all of the accessing.

    I just don't know why, and that sort of weirds me out.

    Well, I just felt like posting that, because it was strange.  But it doesn't seem to have happened again today, so at least it's not another weird bot thing like what happened on this blog earlier.

    Anyhow, on to today's not-NaNoWriMo progress!

    Today I wrote 2,176 words,

    putting my total for the month up to 5,484,

    and the work as a whole up to 255,484.

    So, not as good as yesterday, but still doing pretty okay.  😀

IWSG: NotNaNo Yet Again (2023 ver.)

 

    This year's November 1st is a Wednesday, so I guess my IWSG post for the month gets to double as my first rebellious NotNaNoWriMo post.

    Because (obliquely answering the month's question) I used to participate in NaNoWriMo faithfully, from 2011 until...uh...whatever year it was they redesigned their website.  I'm wanting to say the redesign was in 2019?  Well, whenever it was, I hated the ugly new look so much--and especially hated the way it decided the focal point of our project pages should be cover images (which they provided, outside the rare instances of people who provided their own) instead of, you know, our words, and the way that it scrambled my Camp NaNo data so now it says that all my minute and hour goals were word goals, and that I wrote nothing on my last Camp session (and then they closed down the Camp NaNo site a week before they said they were going to, so I couldn't retrieve the actual data and manually input it to fix the problem!)--that I refused to take part officially again until they repaired the damage.  (I mean, not that I expect them to magically restore my lost data, just that I won't officially participate again unless they, at a bare minimum, restore the project pages to focus on words instead of images.  For a writing challenge, I don't think I am even the slightest bit out of line in thinking what they've done to the project pages is just plain bass ackwards.)

    Well, they haven't, so I'm still only doing NaNo unofficially, using my blog to keep track of my word count.  I do miss the nice graph they provided, though.  😭  I need to see if I can make a nice graph like that in Office or something.  🤔

    This year, I'm doing something pretty weird.  This spring, I started having heart palpitations while working on a game jam script, and being unsure what had caused it, I first dropped out of the jam and then decided to stop working on game dev until the problem was solved.  Well, a lot of expensive and pointless medical appointments later, I think my friend was right when she said it could be peri-menopause, which lets me self-medicate because one of the treatments for peri-menopause symptoms is melatonin, and I already had a bottle of melatonin gummies, and since I've started taking them regularly, the heart palpitations have been greatly reduced.  Not quite gone, but....

    Well, anyway, when I dropped out of game dev activities, I decided to calm my mind by writing some nice, safe fan fiction.

    I'm still writing it.

    Like, the same piece of fan fiction.

    It is crazy long.  (Yes, that's the word count as of Oct. 31.)  But thanks to taking a breather while right at 250k, it'll be easy for me to measure my path towards 50k for the month:  when I hit 300k, I'll have made it!  😆  (The terrifying part is that there's no way I'll finish it before hitting 300k at this point.  It's effectively two full length novels--one a war novel and the other a political drama (I hope), with a novella in between to bridge the stories--but as they're the same over-sized work, I don't have to try to force a feeling of completion (or even semi-completion) on the earlier part(s) like I would if this was an original work that I intended to share with others.)

    I've done an outline that, while probably only about a third of the remaining story (I think), will probably last me through November.

    I do hope the whole thing won't take too much longer to complete, though; I'm starting to feel a little shackled to it.  😅  (Which isn't to say that I don't want to finish writing it.  It's just that I also have other projects I want to work on but I have trouble working on more than one project at a time, outside of periodic unusual circumstances...)

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    Anyway, after today's writing period is over, I'll be adding my first day's word count down here.  😄  (Hopefully with a nice graph, but we'll have to see what I can find...)

    So, today's writing has been completed.

    Total words in work:  253,308

    Nov. 1 words written:  3,308

    (Looks pretty good, right? 😁  Setting it up was a bit of a pain in the neck, but...overall I think it worked out well, except that somehow my calculations were off and so I ended up being ten words over on the goal words.  Not sure how that happened or when an extra ten words got added in, but they're in there somewhere, so suddenly the goal words written for the last day are 1,657 instead of 1,667.  But I figure with numbers this big, ten words are kind of irrelevant...)