Baedon's Curious Web

If there is one thing that I can say about participating in NaNoWriMo (http://www NULL.nanowrimo NULL.org/) 2009 it is this: I know I want to write fiction. That said, what does thatmean for my future? It only means that I will be devoting some small part of my life to becoming a writer. Weather I will write for my own personal entertainment or as a means of trying to make money, that is yet to be seen. But, I do love it.

Here is a brief list of the things I learned from this last month’s journey into the world of the writer:

• Chris Batty (http://en NULL.wikipedia NULL.org/wiki/Chris%20Baty) is part genius and part nutcase.
• Planning your book ahead of time would be helpful.
• You can always chuck your plan out the window at any time in the writing process.
• One should write what they know, not what they think they know.
• Never miss a day’s word goal; you are forever trying to catch up afterwards.
• If there is a WriteIn in your area, by all means go to it. There is nothing like meeting up with fellow writers and the down social exchange is great.
• MicroSoft Word is not too bad to work with, once you get used to it.
• Do not waste your money on programs designed for writers, there are many free alternatives out there. (There will be a list at the end of this post.)
• Never give up.
• 50,000 words is a lot of typing but do not always convey everything you want in our story. It can either be a nightmare trying to reach the goal for the month or it can be a good stepping stone to something bigger and better.

For those of you that participated in this roller coaster ride of a challenge, it does not matter if you finished it or not, you still have accomplished a goal that others wish they could. You actually sat down and wrote a story or at the very least the start of one.

I know I had a great time and I do plan to revisit this whacky world of trying to fit writing a novel into one month again next year. Until then, I will keep on writing. After all, I did come up with about three ideas for a novel. I think I’ll work on one of them as practice until next November. Now, back to your regular infrequent posts.

Here are a couple of freeware tools that I found useful in my novel writing adventure:

Q10 (http://www NULL.baara NULL.com/q10/) This is a full screen, get rid of distractions, text editor. Here are some of the cool features:

• Word, page and character counts are updated live as you type.
• Easy use timer. Perfect for timed writing sessions and word wars. When the time is over, it will tell you how many words you wrote in that period.
• Spell Checker.
• **Cool Feature for NaNoWriMo** Target Count. Displays completed percentage. You can choose units: words, pages, lines, paragraphs or characters.
• And many more excellent features.

FreeMind (http://freemind NULL.sourceforge NULL.net/wiki/index NULL.php/Main_Page) Free mind mapping (http://en NULL.wikipedia NULL.org/wiki/Mind_map) software.

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