And, She's Off....Writing for NaNoWriMo.org

I don’t anticipate a whole lot of action in my blogs this month. I’m participating in the NaNoWriMo.org November Novel Writing Contest. I’ve written two days and devised a clever, yet way cool spreadsheet to track how I’m doing. Different than the table I used last year which had a count of each chapter. This one takes into account the fact that I might dip into an already written part and add to it. How it will work is at the end of a days writing I cover over the entire text…ctrl A ought to do it and get a word count. The word count is placed into the table.

What I think is neat is that the equations are set up to subtract all that has been produced before to come up with just what was done that day. That way I can begin in the middle of a sentence, which is a good thing. Not having a completed thought when you leave a piece of writing enables you more easily to pick up on your train of thought when you return to it. At least that's what they've told me. Then I also don't have to do awkward things like color coding anything or mark it in any way so I know just exactly where that piece of writing happened. I also incorporated an IF statement so that the next day’s stuff doesn’t return a weird number. I also have a number for where I should be. That way I can easily see if I’m still on target. Roughly, I want to do 3 pages a day. More if I can handle it.

Anyway, if I can get it up here you can see what I did. The places to input numbers are in the green column. That would be the total written in its entirety. Ctrl A to select and word count to see how many words. Then, you can widen the comments column. It wouldn't fit in the blog unless I squeezed it up. If it helps somebody, good. I think it will help me to stay on target.

What I find interesting is that you, Dear Reader, can input numbers into this spreadsheet to see how it works. Refreshing the page returns it to how I uploaded it. You can even save it for yourself if you want.