Skip to main content

NaNoWriMo 2014: Day 4

I ended today with only 6671 words. Staying on par would have been 6667 so I was only four words over, and worse I only wrote 1600 words today. That's technically under goal for the day, but I'm on pace for the month. I made the mistake of not getting even a little writing time in during the morning, before work, so I had everything to do sitting down at night. If I aim to get back on track I need to get in 30 minutes tomorrow morning and the mornings after that, giving myself a head start for the day.

Jory MacKay's How I Forgot to Write was a particularly personally hitting piece to read as my daily writing motivation. If we aren't careful we can let the skills we have wane and that is certainly something I think happened to me at some point in the last five years, and regaining those skills is a big part of what I'm doing NaNoWriMo.

The six-step program outlined is full of gems. Among the two that I hold most closely to my own writing: Find a routine and Learn to love editing. From these two the most important lines I'm carrying away today will help motivate me.
what matters is that you set a schedule and stick to it.
 and
Writing is editing.
 But, really, you should read the whole piece.

See all my posts about NaNoWriMo 2014

Comments

Anonymous said…
Hi there, good to see that your writing improves, but could you please send *just* the Python posts to the Planet Python RSS feed? Thank you!

Popular posts from this blog

CARDIAC: The Cardboard Computer

I am just so excited about this. CARDIAC. The Cardboard Computer. How cool is that? This piece of history is amazing and better than that: it is extremely accessible. This fantastic design was built in 1969 by David Hagelbarger at Bell Labs to explain what computers were to those who would otherwise have no exposure to them. Miraculously, the CARDIAC (CARDboard Interactive Aid to Computation) was able to actually function as a slow and rudimentary computer.  One of the most fascinating aspects of this gem is that at the time of its publication the scope it was able to demonstrate was actually useful in explaining what a computer was. Could you imagine trying to explain computers today with anything close to the CARDIAC? It had 100 memory locations and only ten instructions. The memory held signed 3-digit numbers (-999 through 999) and instructions could be encoded such that the first digit was the instruction and the second two digits were the address of memory to operat...

Announcing Feet, a Python Runner

I've been working on a problem that's bugged me for about as long as I've used Python and I want to announce my stab at a solution, finally! I've been working on the problem of "How do i get this little thing I made to my friend so they can try it out?" Python is great. Python is especially a great language to get started in, when you don't know a lot about software development, and probably don't even know a lot about computers in general. Yes, Python has a lot of options for tackling some of these distribution problems for games and apps. Py2EXE was an early option, PyInstaller is very popular now, and PyOxide is an interesting recent entry. These can be great options, but they didn't fit the kind of use case and experience that made sense to me. I'd never really been about to put my finger on it, until earlier this year: Python needs LÖVE . LÖVE, also known as "Love 2D", is a game engine that makes it super easy to build ...

Using a React Context as a Dispatch Replacement

React Contexts are the pretty little bows of the React world. Here's a really quick example of the kind of messy code you can cleanup by using contexts, without dragging in a larger dependency like Redux or even Flux. Starting backwards with a diff showing lines of code I was able to remove: All the properties I was able to remove were just pass-through. The Carousel component didn't care about any of them, but it had to pass through these callbacks so the multiple TaskList components inside the carousel could invoke actions. They were removed from the Component class itself, too, since it no longer needed to pass them through. Where did they all go? My ActionContext removed all the need for these passthroughs by providing a single simple helper method, action(), that components rendered under it can access.   I really enjoy the pattern of passing a single callback through a context and removing what used to be lots of callback properties. Of course, I cou...