A Murderous Serpent

[izmeina]

Slinks by sulking.
The temptation to for decadent indulgence is increasing rapidly.
Got a love letter just short of one thousand silver sickles from the evil goblins of the Oz tax office

A bright shiny new Preciousssss is very tempting especially after struggling with these superhighway speeds of 256mb memory

It kind of spoils the flow when google docs keeps going down and when on the odd occasion it is up and running, we are getting spinning beachballs just about every tenth word

So now finally scraped the official word count for the day - probably only 3 or 4 times since the start of the insanity

But now there's the problem that everyone else has in reverse - they all get to 49,000 words with only the barest of skeletons on the story

And here's the squiggling serpent with basically the whole story structure set up and the skin and bones and other bits all in place but only two thirds of the way in

So now got to come up with evil schemes to pad out the whole thing with pink frills and quills and pretty pussy cat plates but without adding a single solitary chapter - all the scenes we likes but no new chapters

Looks like it's time to shuffle the deck because getting up the word count by tweeking - a sentence here and another there and two adjectives where one could do - it is ever so time consuming
Not at all in the same league as just squiggling a scene in 30 mins or so and tossing 600 sucker or so onto the tally of Doom

And now the latest update of doom

Goes slaving over a hot keyboard this morning instead of sitting out in the glorious sunshine
Was hoping to be way over yesterday's target of 33,333 words but had wasted so much time with useless Google docs dropping out and not saving and being generally useless

So goes pottering along typing extra paragraphs here and there and suddenly the blank screen of doom appears
Nothing at all on the page and no scrollbar. The word count confirmed the worst - total number of pages 1 and total words 0
It's not the first time this shit has happened

So just goes and restores the most recent previous saved version. After a while typing - sees a nice 998 at the end of the word count. That seems a lot for only four or five paragraphs
Looked again - not 33998 but 32 998. So all that typing has REDUCED the score by 400 or so words
At this rate, will be down to 15,000 by the 29th of November

It's so silly to get so upset over what began as an interesting serpentine unscientific experiment with no consequences in the external world - just a personal challenge

But it's the chaos, unpredictability and unreliability of this infernal thing that is so damned frustrating. Totally lost faith in the whole sad saga at this stage

Did try using a basic bare bones text editing program but it's got no word count facility and not even an autosave option.
As sucky and useles as googledocs is - at least all the various saved versions are out there - it's just the tedious task of searching through them searching for the evil green missing links

It would be much faster to just count the losses and keep squiggling a pile of new stuff if not for the total loss of confidence that the same thing would happen to those words too

So now after two hours of slaving over a hot keyboard, the Izzie now has exactly 12 words less than when we started this morning and is in a most foul, frustrated and murderous mood

So any suggestions for a half decent and reliable word processing prog that is mac friendly?


Well at least a few days away will be good for thinking time so it's just then a case of getting it all down and keeping the fingers crossed

Comments

[catness]

No idea about Mac-specific programs. As an emergency workaround, I suggest going low-tech. Use any simple local word processor, forget about autosave and word count - you can teach yourself to save manually from time to time, and checking word count after every paragraph is not helpful to productivity ;) Just make sure that it can work with big files, by opening and saving any big file.

Post the chapters separately, to any site which is accessible through a web browser, such as DW, and use a browser Javascript bookmarklet to count words - for example, this one: http://www.marklets.com/bookmarklets/Word+Count.aspx It counts words in a mouse-selected region of a web page. For the total word count, use the calculator.

Hope you'll be able to finish it soon! If anyone deserves to call this Nano a win, it is you :)

[izmeina]

Izzie has already posted some individual chapters on DW - just being a paranoid python as usual

The latest version of chapters 1-16 contained all those tweeks that got Izzie over the 33333 word count on Friday before the evil google zapped the whole damned thing
Added a few names of gods and things to the ritual - and Prometheus gave the serpent an idea for more guts and gore

At present - after a ridiculous 40 mins of Opera freezing and getting spinning beachballs of doom after every ten words or so in google docs, came up with the idea of typing in notepad and saving and then pasting bit by bit to google docs
That solves most of the freezing issue and means we can get a word count as we go along
So managed to scrape together 800 words or so instead of the 1800 or so we would have liked
So annoying to be in the situation of having the ideas but being unable get them on paper due to all these stupid tech glitches
The plot is not the problem at all

[catness]

p.s. this bookmarklet works at least in Opera and Firefox - drag&drop it onto the toolbar to use. The word count may be a bit different from the Nano site, but a few dozen words overall shouldn't matter much.

[zimena]

Hi there. catness pointed me here. I hope you don't mind? ;-)

As for writing software for Mac, I have been using WriteRoom for the two years or so. You can set it to auto-save your work, and you can choose to have a word-counter visible at all times, too. What's more - the word-counter actually counts the words - it doesn't interpret things like '-' or '***' as "words". I don't know if that's a plus while you're working on NaNo, though :-D

For me, the good thing about WriteRoom is that you can set your own colors, so that you can work with light text on a dark background if you wish. Also, you can work in full-screen mode, which might sometimes help in keeping focused on the text, instead of getting distracted by the wonders of the web? The "bad" thing about WriteRoom is perhaps that you don't have any formatting options - no bold text, no italics, no bigger fonts for the headers. All the text looks the same. But, for fic writing, this works nicely at least for me.

Of course I don't know if you will agree, but perhaps it could be worth a try? At least I'll stop sounding like a Writeroom commercial now!

[izmeina]

Thanksss for the suggestion. Will check it out tomorrow when we got a bit more time - is nearly midnight now

Writeroom sounds like just what the serpent needs
Something straightforward and simple with autosave and word count - nothing more elaborate

Anything has to be better than google docs. Decided to start a totally new file tonight hoping that all the empty space might speed things up a bit

It took a ridiculous 40 mins before i could even type one single sentence. If it was not google docs being dumb it was Opera constantly freezing and being a useless bit of shit
But the time you jump through all those sorts of hoops, any inspiration and desire to write is well and truly gone :(

PS If you want to read steamy Smeik Slash (the Cat will explain) do join Dreamwidth and add squigglingserpent as a friend - we will add you to the Cardassian Cats filter

[izmeina]

Oh and a thanks to you both
here's a snippet from tonight's serpent squiggles as a token of appreciation

The mission is to add 18,000 words of fillers to a basically already completed story

So there will be lots of quotes from nonexistent books and visits to Room 666 in The Tower of Terror ;)

Here is a paragraph or two from
The Book of Lies - the charmed life of a literary agent

The sad saga of Posh McBecks

I. Phistomel Smeik hereby relate the tale of a sad creature who was too clever for her own good or rather she thought she was
While often seeking souls for sale, sometimes the standard can be rather low so then I will usually make do with cold hard cash. I do make exceptions for interesting cases - unusual clients or statistical anomalies. But Posh McBecks was neither of these - just a a vain petty boring bitch interested in nothing but her 15 minutes of fame
And in her search it was to me that she came
Having proudly proclaimed to have never read a book in her life, she had the audacity to ask me to ghost write her autobiography and to use my talents and influence in the publishing industry to guarantee its status as a number one seller - preferably for the Christmas Lists

I obliged. Not because i wanted or need the money but because I thought she would make an interesting specimen on the shelf in the very likely event of defaulting on our arrangements

She made thousands in royalties on the sales but was expecting millions and so claimed that this miserable failure was due to my lack of writing abilities rather than her rather sad, pathetic and mediocre story. Even the devil cannot make a silk purse out of a pig's ear

She employed a lawyer to cheat me of my ten percent sales commission. That clearly constituted breach of contract
So it was time to invite her for a visit to The Tower of Power and the joys of Room 666

I knew that her greatest fear of all was to be a nobody - not to be noticed and to be deprived of the oxygen of publicity. But there were other more interesting paths of pain to pursue

[zimena]

Good luck. I hope you'll like it!

As for the browser problems and Google Docs - I can totally understand that it must be very frustrating. And yes, with all those problems, you just lose interest in what you wanted to write in the first place. Hopefully, the problems will be sorted soon!

Oh, and thank you so much for offering to add me. I have the same username here on DW as I have on LJ, but there is no content on my DW journal. Yes, I'm bad and keep posting on LJ. I'll be very happy to read your stuff, though - the Cat already recommended it ;-)

[izmeina]

Izzie suspects that most of the problems are due to our astronomical 256mb memory!
Sad that a five year old computer is so quickly relegated to dinosaur status

But the other day after getting lots and lots writtin before googledocs died just before 11pm - popped into a netcafe the following day and it was at least an hour there before evil google would save stuff so just typed nothing and pottered around in other places online

Just added you to the Cardassian Cats filter - let us know if it has worked or not

[zimena]

Yes, it worked! At first I wondered why it didn't work, because you were listed in my profile under the "Mutual access" list, but I still didn't see any posts. Now I'm seeing them, though - lots of super secret Cat business and such. I'm looking forward to reading them!