At midnight I got into the Night of Writing Dangerously. That moment when Halloween is over, All Saints Day began and NaNoWriMo rings the bell to start. Well, I don’t know about the bell. It must be in my head. There are tons of writing groups that get together and type for a couple hours. I have done that a couple times. But usually, I just pretend I am with a group and get it going on my own. I will watch this when I finish here as I didn’t watch it last night. I just wanted to share the excitement and fun.
My theory is that if I can start large I will be slightly ahead when the mid-month slumps or people-time interruptions occur. But I managed 2,329 words last night. And like I said I will be doing more when blogging is completed.
As I have said I am continuing the novel I started way back in March (I think-2020 is hard to keep track of it after months of editing and rearranging bits and pieces, taking out all journaling, complaints, and prompts that didn’t work for the story I ended up–yesterday, at 25,172. So my goal is to add 50,000 to that this month. I know I said this in part last night but I felt I needed to waste some time spelling things out better.
So for the months between the writing of the beginning and now, I have been using three different programs, each featuring something unique to help the writing, editing process. yWriter is my favorite. I can outline on the fly, keep my characters, locations, and items up-to-date, etc. The biggest downfall, for me, has been that it wants to save locally. I learned long ago that computers break down and then where will your documents be? I tried saving to dongles, but that had its own problems. Finally, I started to export the project and save it in my cloud drive. But once you have a new machine you have to reset-up how you had it before the breakdown. That happened in September. My laptop nosedived and my husband loaned me his to try and keep up my writing. Good thing I had that export to rebuild from. Then my husband turned me on to yWriter7. Now we can save everything to Dropbox. I was new to it so Hubby had to teach me how that works. And it does! And I can open the project on my Fire or tablet or even my phone if I get the inspiration. Here’s a YouTube of how it works:
The second favorite that I use a lot at the beginning of a story and then just try to copy and paste to keep it updated is WriteItNow It is great for setting up characters. You can do a random search of names or add ones you have already created. Then you can find personality traits, set up who is related to whom and how. I like the colors I can make the background and fonts. Anyway, here is a YouTube on this amazing program:
The last step for me is opening one of the latest exports from yWriter in good ole Microsoft Word, where I open Grammarly and do the editing. I don’t think I need an URL or YouTube on Word. But as I was writing this I saw a bunch of tutorials that I may want to stroll through and learn other ways to use what I have.
By the way, I have Scrivener but somehow in moving computers I can’t seem to figure out how to get it up and running again. I did find it had its uses but I often found it confusing. To each their own, I suppose.
Okay, I’ve procrastinated writing long enough. Hope you found something here that is useful for you.
All the best Darlene
Thank you!
👍👍
You are a rock star! That was a good, long post AND you wrote over 2100 words for NaNoWriMo last night? Girl, you are an inspiration for everyone else that’s doing it this year! Good luck, rock on!
Thank you. I love starting mid-story as it doesn’t take as much thought to blast off. I’m trying to get ahead while the muses are shouting because I know how tight lipped they can get mid-month.
Good luck 💜
Thank you! Hope you are feeling better.. I’ll try to get far ahead so I can visit you and my other favorite bloggers.
You take care 😍😍💜
😍💜😍