A bad progress report
I’ll keep this one short.
Only 2510 words this week. That does bring the total work count for the novel to over 45000 words.
It’s laziness not writer’s block.
I’m going to blame this partly on a couple of raccoons that were making noise on our roof most of one night which left me with less than an hour of sleep early last week. I spent the next few days too tired to even read much less write.
However, the rest of the blame is mine. I did not go back to writing as soon as I could have. I was just plain lazy (and not from sleep).
I did feel a bit stuck. In my last post, I mention that during that post I discovered what I should do. Well, I was not sure how to start in that direction. I also still have doubts how it’s going to work (or work out).
I am over that hill finally. I should be able to write quite a bit before I hit the next roadblock. Provided I can make this work in my head.
I may be switching writing software.
I’ve been using a program called Focuswriter. There is a lot that I really like about it. I even like the cheesy typewriter sounds it makes. It’s simple. It’s fast. I can make it look just the way I like. It has few editing features as it is designed to keep you focused on writing.
However, as I reach the 40000 word level, it’s limitations are showing. Actually, my limitations are showing. I have yet to develop my own method to keep track of things in the story. The single large document file is hard to navigate. It can take me a few minutes to skip to the beginning and search around to find something and then return to the end where I am working.
I’ve heard about another program that many writers are using.
It’s called Scrivener. It designed for writing something of this length. It seems to have several ways to make navigating a large document much easier. It has some outlining features that might even help me start to plot in advance.
I had not looked at Scrivener before as I understood it was Mac and Windows only. I use Linux on my primary computer at home. I just discovered that they do have a Linux version.
So, when I should be working on the novel right now (after finishing this post) I’ll be trying to take a crash course in Scrivener. I am hoping this is a profitable delay that will help me write better and faster. I hope to make up for the time lost.
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