Gearing Up for 50k

So what do you do after you've finished your first marathon? Hmm... Why not start your next 50k-word novel? NaNoWriMo 2005 started today and lots of people are already off to the races. You don't need anything but a pencil and paper and a few ideas in your head to get started, but if you're like me, you have almost as much fun with the technology as you do with the writing and wow! is there ever a bunch of technology you can choose from for this “event.”

First and most important in the NaNo tech extravaganza are the writing tools. In the past I've relied on Z-Write or MacJournal to write my novels, but I'm definitely using something new this year. Z-Write hasn't really been updated in quite a while and is a little buggy and aged. MacJournal is great, but it's not really made for this purpose and it's fun to try new things. TUAW reviewed some options recently, and I'm toying with using CopyWrite. It's got lots of cool things, but especially the ability to attach notes to individual documents like chapters or character sketches. (Here's a review of CopyWrite.) Ulysses looks cool, too, but way too expensive. And then there's the Scrivener beta, which looks like the swiss army knife of writing programs. It does all that and a bag of chips, or at least it claims to, but it's beta so you have to wonder about the wisdom of trusting it with your novel. Jer's Novel Writer, appears to be free and filled with all the neato cool things like notes attached to docs and also has a supercool margin notes feature that I imagine I'd use all the time. Finally, there's this Avenir thing that looks interesting, too.

But in addition to writing tools, there are writing counters! Last year I used NaNoWriMoProMe, which makes it easy to show your progress on a blog. But I also used the NaNo Report Card, an Excel sheet that helps you track your progress in multiple ways. You can find multiple versions in that discussion thread, one of which is available here. And if that's not enough, there are more blog word-counters here.

What to do? What to do? Oh, I know, I can play w/technology options all day and not write a word!

Posted November 1, 2005 08:02 AM | NaNoWriMo