What I did in November: start a novel Nanowrimo way!

What prompted me?  Not certain.

How I did!  I qualified on November 22 with about 65,000 words.

Where is it going and how did I do it?

Taking a page from Nanowrimo winner, Pete Denison, who shared his tools at the beginning of the challenge,

I used these analog tools:

Analog tools

I was out and about when I first thought to do Nanowrimo and had an Exaclair sketchbook with me. It  is too precious for just plain scribbling so I pulled out a red Moleskine.  I've always thought "red" was energy and to complete 50,000 words in 30 days needs energy.   I also had a Fabriano A5 Misto spiral notebook that I used for scheduling and a small Midori Diamond Memo reporter which I carried around, even from room to room, as thoughts went through my head.

Books were a huge part of my creative process as those wonderful friends are characters in the novel.

And these digital tools:

I would normally have just written in Microsoft Word but at the outset it seemed to be corrupted and I started to panic.   I didn't want to buy another package, and called my not very local Mac distributor in New York City, Tekserve, to see if they could help me.   The Tech Rep mentioned in passing a downloadable program called, Open Office.  I downloaded it straight away and discovered it was easy to master.

I started to write in Open Office and quickly did import and export with Scrivener.

Winners got a discount yesterday, December 1, for this fabulous program.  I was able to cut and paste without really moving around as one would other programs and simply created a new document;  one can merge two documents with the flick of the wrist, and it keeps a count of your individual document words, and then project statistics, making it easy to see where you are in reaching your goals.

Back two years ago one of the Women's Festival in Hobart (New York) workshop presenters mentioned Scrivener, but I wasn't writing a novel then and didn't buy it.

Yesterday I got my registered copy of the program and feel I was given a gift.

I intend to edit and finish the novel before the Spring hits the Valley.

Midori bought at Jet Pens
Fabriano bought a Brushstrokes
Moleskine Red Sketchbook, options nationally
Exaclair, gifted
Scrivener at Literature & Latte