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
Labels:

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!
5:02 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My Software Job Transition Strategies?

I’ve been spending a good deal of the last two days preparing mentally for starting a whole new challenge as a developer. New things aren’t new to me, but this is different and big enough really call for some Deep Thoughts ™. For one thing, I’ve made a big move from the world of Python web development to totally other Python work and while web development has never been the only thing I do, it has been the only work that paid the bills. That transition isn’t one that bothers me or daunts me, though. Instead, I’m thinking about transitioning to the scope of the work I’m getting into. For a long time, I juggled multiple clients and client projects every day, so no single project usually took up most of my time. Every developer juggles time through the day, but exactly how that works in each company and on each project varies a lot. I was looking for a place that I could really focus in a way that I haven’t for a long time. I think I found that, but now I have to deal with the consequen...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
1 comment
Read more

The Snake Pit is About to Burst

The signs are all over the place. I can count at least five implementations of Python today: CPython, CL-Python, Jython, IronPython, and PyPy. The use of the language is sky rocketting and set to grab real mind-share as the hype over Ruby subsides. Things are looking good for a favorite green snake and british comedy troop reference, aren't they? Trouble is on the horizon in the very ingredients that could push us into true success. Our community and our very language is in danger of segregation, unless we all do something about it and learn to get along. One of the most visible dangers (to me) is being ignored for various political, cultural, and non-technical reasons. IronPython's users are increasingly pushing IronPython-only recipes, libraries, and tutorials. No one is talking about the transition of the alternative implemenations to CPython 3.0 compatability. To make matters worse, we still can not define the language without refering to an implementation. This is very un...
11 comments
Read more