Your Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is “how.” Use the word “how” in your post. Bonus points if you start your post with it. Enjoy!
How is it Saturday already?
How is it I didn’t realize it was AtoZ April?
How is it I can’t do anything I’m supposed to do but spending so much energy and time on everything but my tasks?
Well, three days behind on writing. But…
Maybe two or three days more.
Slipper one at heel stage. Tomorrow slipper two heel.
Okay. Not to be hard on myself. Even though I had dilated eyes I opened a speech-to-text app. I talked out some memories to add to my project. Certainly not enough, but something.
Next task is yWriter and writing. Two and a half days of writing tonight. But how?
Listen, since NaNoWriMo, my life is nothing but lists. I am editing using Word’s Editor and now Grammarly. The list in the editor is punctuation, spelling, concise, readability, grammar, etc. I don’t remember the exact list, but I spent the day yesterday and today going through Pandamapocalypse tick by tick. I finished Word’s editor, finally reaching zero mistakes. And now I have started Grammarly’s checklist. I can’t believe that having no mistakes on Word shows as 1,773 mistakes to remedy in Grammarly. As I get that done tomorrow, I will be copying and pasting from the Word version into my Scrivener, yWriter, and WriteItNow. Once that is done, I will reread the whole thing listening to the text-to-speech to catch the weird or uncomfortable turn of phrase that the editors don’t catch. And I still have a couple chapters to write, then send those chapters through the editorial lists. Gah!
I’ll bet most of those doing this exercise are speaking of Clause and naughty or nice. But this year was punishment enough! My happiness will be checking my list of books out of the library of novels in the raw and getting them into the real library someday. Goals take lists.
On day 1, the politicians and NaNo writers say, I will… here it is day 2. Yeah, I did all the things, LOL!
That was a bit more than one line. But you get the gist. That was my answer to One-liner Wednesday. Thank you Linda G. Hill for this fun, easy prompt.
Just a bit about my day, I spent the day finding more pictures to represent characters I hadn’t found images for before. I find it helps me as I write to get a better handle on them. Mostly I am trying to make sure all my programs have all I’ve done so far. I promised my blogging friend jenanita01 I would share my experience with Scrivener as I go. This copying and pasting from the other programs, Word, WriteItNow, and yWriter have given me the first experiences. If you like ctrl/a, ctrl/c, ctrl/v, like I do there, is a new step when you land in Scrivener. I kept pasting to Scrivener and the result would be one long URL (blue underlining of the copied work). I finally figured out that if I did ctrl/shift/v it pasted perfectly.
I probably need to back up a bit. After two days of reading the instructions of writing in Scrivener, I was lost. I found the tutorial on their website that said you can start with a template of the kind of document you want. I chose the 2 part novel. It will probably be 3 but for now, this will do.
One of the first neat tricks I learned is ctrl/n that is for a new text (scene). One was already there but I didn’t know beyond there what to do. Right-click and the new text and a lot of stuff I still don’t know are right there. Oh, and ctrl/shift/n is a new folder (chapter). Figured out character templates, too. I should have copied the template and used it over and over. Instead, I made one character then duplicated the template, and just filled in the new character’s info. It works!
I have options. I can accept the word count on WriteItNow that says of my CampNaNo/NaNoWriMo combination novel that says that I reached by writing the two words ‘The End’ 75,000. Or I can accept that my adding and subtracting with all the computer glitches, including finding yWriter an empty project as of this morning. Grr! My husband and I found my saved RTFs, and I copied and pasted the missing parts to WriteItNow, then added a few scenes today, making an additional 2,000 to NaNos word count app, bringing that total to 46,235. That one should be the goal for the 28th of 46,676. So, in that case, I am 441 words short. In that case, I need about 2,000 a day until the 30th. I think I will opt to try and find a better place to put that ending. There are lots of loose threads to tie-up. So I will just keep writing until I am satisfied. Then comes editing. Ugh! I doubt I can write 2K a day for the next two days, but I will try for the record.
Your Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is “opt.” Use it as a word or find a word with “opt” in it and base your post on that. Have fun!
There one line! Today was difficult in that I no longer have any main characters to develop. So it was all story. And then the electricity went off. Thank goodness it didn’t stay off. It’s going to cold tonight. 29 degrees Fahrenheit. Not the coldest but without heaters would be uncomfortable. Apparently, there was a blown transformer. I’m grateful the people get on things like that right away. Isn’t it funny how the family gathers and gets a little antsy as we are all out of our element without our electronics to work on?
Okay word count: 30,065 words. Barely made it over the goal for today of 30,006.
I’m still trying to get my Scrivener version up and running so I am not just reliant on yWriter or WriteItNow. My eyes have a harder time with Scrivener. I have had to use a text-to-speech program to read the instructions to me. And it has taken me a couple days to get through the QuickStart. Imagine how long it would have taken to get through the whole thing? But it does have features that look like it would help me be more organized. And I think I can change the backgrounds and fonts to make it easier on my eyes. By the way, there are videos on the Scrivener website that bring it down to what I wanted: How do I get started. Boom! There is was. Tutorials.
This has been a crazy day. I got so frustrated several times that I shouted. It seemed I was caught in a fighting ring of madness. It was so cold in the living room that I moved some of my stuff to the bedroom. I have downloaded yWriter7 onto my Fire, and so I could continue writing on my project there.
I couldn’t get my Bluetooth keyboard to work. The mouse worked, but I needed to type faster than the Fire’s built-in keyboard, even with all the word suggestions, could let me. I tried to go into Word because I knew that I could use the microphone and dictate my story. That worked for a paragraph or two. It misunderstood half of the words. So I copied and pasted what I did get done into the scene open on yWriter. Then I noticed that there was a mic on that keyboard, too.
The problem was that as I added more to the scene if I needed to edit something, the new edits didn’t show up where they were supposed to. Ring around the frustrated rosy! So I saved and went and got my laptop from the living room to start again.
Dropbox did save it properly. I was pretty happy with that. But then I started writing and had a great five minutes of the story growing. The battery had died and the laptop shut down. Nope, that last part didn’t get saved. And the bits I tried to make up were not at all the same. URGH!
As I had moved my laptop into the bedroom, I accidentally dropped the mouse. Now when I had a picture I wanted to include for the story, I couldn’t right-click. I yelled, swear words. I’m sorry if you heard them.
I tried to get the Bluetooth mouse to work with the computer, nope. More yelling.
My husband is a saint. I swear! He came in and asked what was wrong. He helped me by getting the mouse fixed and getting the story back where it needed to save parts. By the time he was done, I was back to being the me I know and love. So that ring of patience from him started a new feeling for me.
Here’s the word count: 25,826. How about that more than halfway there! And a day early!
I developed that mother of one of my main characters, Liz’s mom. AZZ is her nickname. She has been told she is a goddess. She looks like this:
Per Linda G. Hill: Your Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is “ring.” Use it as a noun, a verb, an adverb, or an adjective…use it any way you’d like. Have fun!
I hope I got it! Posted this before midnight but had to edit after. SMH Hope you had a better Saturday than I did.
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.
Working on my series: Haven.
Doodler (zendoodle.com)
Music major: voice and piano
Mom of four great adults
Reiki II practitioner
I have been on disability/retired for 10 years now from depression, anxiety and fibromyalgia.
How does a free blog site work when everything is tied to dollars? How do you create content without using proprietary themes when it seems even the colors and fonts are tied to upgrades for usage? Is it even possible? I hope to find out.
Darswords 
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