A Geek Goes Flying

Going to try this. Doubt I’ll win. But it’s a start. Created an account on https://nanowrimo.org/ . As of this writing, November starts in 7 hours, 21 minutes, and 55 seconds. 54. 53. You get it. NaNo Prep 101 . Create a project: https://nanowrimo.org/participants/<username>/projects For this round, I just want to see if I can knock out 50,000 words, so I’m setting it up as a Memoir. Next time, I’ll prep something fictiony. But I’ve got a bunch of stories I can tell, so why the hell not. No one’s ever going to read it, but it’ll be good mental exercise and should be an easier hill to climb to get to that 50K. Deep breath. Here goes. This sets up the goal name, the type of goal (“writing”), the word-count goal (50,000), and the start and end dates (11/01/2024–11/30/2024). Update: I’m behind (shocking). Got off to a decent start on the 1st (984 words), made less progress on the 2nd (736 words), and nada yesterday (Dapper Day at Disneyland). There‘s always time to catch up though.....

Getting ready for NaNoWriMo. The BYOK isn’t out yet. I’m not going to drop $350 on something like a Freewrite Alpha , as cool as I think it is. But I have an old IdeaPad S10 netbook (10.2" 1024x600 screen, surprisingly good keyboard, Atom processor, 2.5 GB RAM, whatever old SATA SSD I had close at hand, and I picked up this DC 5.5x2.5mm to Type C USB cable , which so far works perfectly to charge and power the thing).  IdeaPad S10 netbook   Now I’m on the hunt for a decent Linux distribution (probably DSL 2024 ), and word processing software : I’ll probably end up with AbiWord , but old WordPerfect is still a contender (was using it for years on my 1024x768 VAIO PCG-Z505R), and FocusWriter looks interesting. LibreOffice is probably too heavy. Was not previously aware of FreeOffice TextMaker before, but I should check it out at some point It just needs to provide a relatively distraction-free writing environment that I can work on whenever I have spare time; think this’ll wo...