Thursday, November 03, 2005

NaNoWriMo.

No, I'm not doing it, as such, although Nick is, or at least seems to be. Bully for him, and so forth. But it is a handy stimulus towards creating time for my own writing project, though it doesn't exactly conform to their standards or deadlines. Nevertheless, I hope to handwrite 10,000 words of Pan Theodor Mundstock by November 30th. This will require either picking up the pace in the evenings or forfeiting some between-shift nap time, as I did today. Hopefully not too much of that. And hopefully by the time I start typing later in the month I've have mastered enough LaTeX to be formatting it as I go along. While still converting Burner of Corpses into a much prettier format.

It's nice to have quixotic projects, anyway, and a modicum of external motivation.

4 comments:

notroberttowne said...

about that external motivation... want to send some down the appalachians? I could sure use some.

Anonymous said...

ow right yeah, motivation, I suppose that's what it's called, that which I have been missing since the semester started. Hopefully Richard will bring some next week.

Anyhow, good luck, much inspiration and so forth

Andrew said...

Well, Jef, the trick I find is that external motivation is just part of a toolkit that, practically speaking, results in you tricking yourself into working.

In this case, I'm working on nothing more than the flimsy pretext that a bunch of other people are working on a completely unrelated project.

And Nick, I'm using something called TeXshop. Trying to wrangle my way through figuring some things out and converting from Word without having to do a lot of manual conversion, \textit{} codes for italics being one of the more annoying ones (ditto footnotes) but the end result is a lot more pleasing to the eye.

Andrew said...

But it appears to be mainly bare-knuckle command-line work. It's a refreshing change of pace, and nice to use simply to muck about in a text with, although I'm not sure I'd like to compose in it, what with the complexities of accentuation and so forth.