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"We're the only country on earth stitched together by words and, most important, their dangerous progeny, ideas. And those ideas have had weight. They have had force, not just for us in our eternal dealings, but for the rest of the world." ~ Ken Burns

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

NaNo'11: Day 2

To answer two FAQs I normally hear about this time:

Question 1.

Who are you on the NaNo site, and can I friend you?

Answer 1.
I am NeseraRai, and you absolutely may friend me. However, please do not be hurt if I do not friend you in return. In the past, the NaNo site has been a little odd about the friends list, so I'm in the habit of only friending people in my writing group, and some folks that I'm attending physical write-ins with.

Question 2.

What's the point of this? Don't you just end up with 50,000 words of crap?

Answer 2.

No, I generally end up with 30,000 or so words of crap. The rest, mixed in somewhere, is about 20k of good storytelling. I've been doing this for a few years, and publishing for a few years before then, so my ratio of crap-to-keep is actually pretty high. But the point is, if at the end of NaNo you have 50,000 words and a vague idea of your world, characters, and story, you have now accomplished something you never would have while trying to get the first 100 words perfect.

That said, today's quote of the day...

"And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt."Silvia Plath

Tip of the Day

Save constantly, and back up frequently.

By "save," I mean do not trust your auto-save. In most text-editing programs, you can hit ⌘S (Mac) or Ctrl-S (Win) or probably something similar in any other OS, and your file will SAVE. Do this all the time.

As for backing up, do not trust one copy on one computer. Ever year, I hear of computers frying, getting left in the rain, stolen, reformatted by Dad, destroyed by little Sis, or just dying for no good reason at all. Backing up to a thumb drive is good. If you do this, make sure you know how to properly eject your thumb drive, or you can destroy your data. Also, if you lose your thumb drive, it will inevitably communicate with your computer, and that is when you are most likely to suffer spontaneous computer failure. For that reason, every time you complete a large chunk of work (whatever that means for you), I would recommend backing up in a THIRD place. An internet email account like Yahoo or GMail works pretty well.

Prompt of the Day

Your character has lost something, or left it behind, and needs to go back and look for it.

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