Yay, NaNoWriMo is almost over!
Oh, crap--that means NaNoWriMo is almost over.
Yes, I know that sounded redundant, but those of you who've done this extreme writing sport will get the difference.
And nope, I'm probably not going to win NaNo this year.
I mean, look, I know I could. Win it, that is. I'm currently at 37K words, ish, I can probably write 13K words in a single day; heck, I've written 15K words in a single day before. So with a long, long day tomorrow of blasting through words, I could win.
That, or I could cheat. See, I used to teach software tricks for a living. Back when it was Excel 5, I could show you how to get into the flight simulator. Or, was it a maze? I can't recall any more, and any copies of that software have long since been relegated to the trash heap. But yeah, I used to know all the tricks, and even today I know most of them.
Microsoft Word has something ready-made for the NaNo'er who wants to win no matter what. It's the randomizer function. Back in the old days, it used to give you x number of "The quick brown fox jumps over..." sentences in y number of paragraphs, which generates a crapton of words in mere moments. Later they changed it to create a bunch of Latin wordsmut, but these days it's just boring Help tutorial words. It's still x number of sentences in y number of paragraphs, though, and the command looks like this:
=rand(x,y)
G'head, try it. Open a blank document and type it in there, only replacing x and y with numbers. Turns out I need an x of 25 and a y of 30 to finish my NaNoNovel right now. In fact, with an x of 100 and a y of 100, I can get over 200K words, composed in about 30 seconds. Woo hoo! A whole novel, written in 14 keystrokes (fifteen, technically, since we should count the pressing of the Enter key after).
How's that for automation, eh?
Only, it's not a story. It's just words. They're not fun to read. There's really no reason to even waste the bits on my computer, much less pages on a printer, on drivel like that. So yeah, just--.
No.
I'm simply not gonna do it.
That's not to say my story isn't worth finishing, mind you. It's a pretty awesome story, with a pretty awesome protagonist who's going through some pretty horrible stuff right now as I write one of the pivotal chapters. I'm really enjoying writing this, to tell the truth.
The thing is, there's plenty I can blame my not winning NaNoWriMo on. Most of it is external, too. But you know what? The only person who really cares whether I win NaNo or not is me, anyway. Those who read my books don't care; they just (generally) want me to get more out there to read as quickly as possible. Which is, I have to add real quickly, part of why I stopped blogging so much--I've been focusing on getting drafts done.
But this manuscript takes some effort, and some research, and some harsh emotional trauma, to finish. I was in tears a little earlier, in fact, writing about--well, no plot spoilers here. Later, when you read the book, you'll know it when you see it.
So, sorry, but I probably won't be a 2014 NaNoWriMo winner.
Ah, well. You're really going to like this story, anyway.
- TOSK
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