typo(s), tendency and text

r4gni:

And here I would like to have an animated, blinking gif. But I don't. Yes, there is not much more to say. I won NaNoWriMo, not a second to late, but rather a day early. As I am writing this, I am sitting in the Piksel Hut in Bergen, where I and some guys from the HackBergen group meet to do an Open Hack Day. The other three are working on their electronics projects, I was writing. And am now celebrating my big winning moment with them and my many far away friends. This happens not just-in-time, but whenever they read what I have posted on various social web services.

I managed to write 50250 words. There is still a lot to do about the text for it to become a novel: The spaceship in part two has not landed yet. And I haven't even started on writing part three, where my vampire is going to be a space traveller.

I loved this challenge, and I hated it. But I mostly loved it, and want to thank the people who have organized NaNoWriMo for the tenth time in a row. It is an awesome way of getting started with writing of longer texts. I was anxious, and every time I got back to writing after work or daily chores, (or simply slacking) I was anxious again. The challenge to pull off writing so many words in short time, makes the anxiety count less. You have an aim, and you know you can reach it. And you also know, that there are loads of people doing the same thing at the same time.

Now, if this text will become a novel there i still a lot of work to do, research, rewriting, editing, writing more. Planning the plot couldn't hurt, either. But I learned a lot only by doing this. And that was exactly my plan. Now I have more questions that I can ask, topics on the craft that I can explore. Before it would have been a theoretical thing, now its close to something that I have done before. I'd like to thank everybody who encouraged me, and everybody who ignored my tweets about this even though there were really boring.

I can not find the words for how happy I am that I started this project. I get lost in epic descriptions, waste time on getting new ideas where the plot and some minor sub plots should go, but it is just so glad that I get to explore my prose writing abilities. They are not the highest, as of now. But I know that I can trust my inner instincts of what might be bad for future writing projects. And that I can trust my insecurity about some things as an indicator on what I should work on. Running through this process is, not least, a great help in not stopping to think too much and work myself up over all these aspects the "inner editor" or "inner critic" (as NaNoWriMo-ers are referring to those insecurities), and just keep on writing.

One good example to mention would be: I sent my main character and two of her friend on a journey with a pirate ship in a post-apocalyptic future. Now, I don't know anything about sea navigation and steering a ship (well, at least for big ships), so I took what I knew, and just sort of drafted the rest around it, to get to the really important point, where the main character had to sort out important trust problems with another character. Knowing that I could find out about this stuff afterwards, and tat I could just take what I needed, to research and add the correct details someday maybe at a later time in the project, gave me the drive to get over the self criticism. Criticism is important, but it should never get beyond the point where i stops or hinders you in doing good/important things. Not being to hard on myself there, is a good experience, that I hope I can take with me beyond NaNoWriMo time.

I got past 40k word count-wise. In other words: 80 percent of the project is complete. I can only state again, what I said earlier. Stopping now would be insane.

Yes, the days before the conference were all about writing, writing, writing. I broke 20k before the conference, and was two days of writing ahead.  Since then I am one day behind, which I try to catch up on today, before next week begins. I also have to wash clothes, and exercise. Sitting in office chairs, or sleeping are the only activities these days - and they are taking their toll on my wellbeing.

But I made a wordcloud on wordle, and you can have a neak peak at the most important words in my novel-ish marathon text.

Oh, yes. I am writing in german.

Friday I was just plain lazy. Very typical "thank god its friday" kind of thing, I just stranded in front of my screen watching "Fringe", "The Vampire Diaries" and "The Sarah Jane Adventures". I did not write a single word. So today, again, I had to catch up on writing of two days NaNoWriMos worth. I managed doing that being on the IRC channel (#nanowrimo on irc.goodchatting.com) fighting word wars together with others against ourselves.

The IRC bot BattleJesus is serving us with the scenery for it, where we word fighters join a war with a command, and BattleJesus  tells us that we are on the war. That it is 60 second until he war. That it begins. That we are halfway through, That we are 3/4 through. And that the word war is over. Then you can tell BatteJesus the wordcount you managed to pull, and you are done. Save & backup, not to forget. That way I managed to keep up, even though I tidied and cleaned the whole appartment & had an epic afternoon nap, and procrastinated some more. Heck, I even wrote two blogposts!

A good friend of mine decided to spent one of his precious invitations for the Google Wave Sandbox on me. Expectations to that new service were high after  seeing a video that promised to reinvent email, wiki, personal pages, IM as communications channels, and renew them in a way that made things easier, more collaborative and not as fractioned anymore.

I have tried it, and I must say that my expectations were not met. Without all the bots now flooding Google Wave, wave is somehow a very slow realtime web-based Multi-User-Chat. My first thought was: This looks a little bit like the realtime chat-feature in that dinosaur ICQ version from almost ten years ago. Only in colour, and with maps, and...Well, probably not bad after all.

Another expectation is also not yet met: Wave being an open protocol, based on XMPP, which enables everyone to set up their own wave service. Similar to email, for instance. Imagine email not being implementable by each and everyone with a webserver. That would, obviously, be very bad. Or would it? So if Wave claims to be the new black email+, it can not only depend on Google as an organization, can it? As cloudy as it may be. As I hear, the open part of the waveprotocol is not yet very wave-ey. Which is sad. I hope, that point, too, improves.

Since I lowered my expectations, though, from a very high level, I find it a quite useful tool. I hope, the Google Wave developers will manage to make it a bit faster, though. The user experience is definitely lacking there.

Another reason for my disappointment probably was, that my experience is based on having only a few people to communicate with. At first, there where my friends. Most of them are quite savvy with communication, so we fiddled a bit, but we did not have much to collaborate on, since we live so far apart and don't really have projects we are working together on right now. But more and more people got on Wave, and in the last week I made contact with librarians in Norway, and not least (most of the) co-organizers of and speakers at the "Free and Open Libraries" conference about F(L)OSS software in libraries next week in Bergen, Norway. So we started collaborating, and suddenly the whole map inclusion in wave made a whole lot more sense.

The second  most interesting thing are public waves. I have searched for waves matching my temporary, or overall professional or private interest. I found interesting waves:

Open wave for librarians using Wave

Female Geeks

NaNoWriMo

Hackerspaces FAQ

And many more public waves. Something that I did not find, though, was a public wave for knitters, and it took off very fast from zero to 101 wavers contributing as of today.

Knitters on Waves

Although in the more tech-savvy wave topics people try to figure out things before they participate, many of they waves with specific topics end up becoming undertaken by people take about the Google Wave sandbox and about figuring things while they are at it. This is tiring, and I find myself not participating anymore where Waves become so bloated and cluttered with dozens or even sometimes hundreds of such messages.

What has not happened yet is the development of a certain code of behaviour, what people called "netiquette" (or something) before for this service. Some places people are concerned about it. Most places they are not. Gina Trapani and Adam Pash from Lifehacker have written the Complete Guide to Google Wave. And there is probably more to come. Not only explanations, but also features.

I am still waiting for things to get more exciting. I didn't use twitter much the first six months I had my account, and now I twitter a lot. With all the tummy-ache that follows, relying on a centralized server. So I really hope it grows on me, because XMPP is great, and I think it could become very useful.

Due to a conference, which was happening today and yesterday, I had to prepare a bunch of stuff to it on wednesday. And I was very involved with the library part of the conference yesterday. So I did not get any writing done yesterday, and only very little on wednesday. But after a private little write-a-t(h)on tonight I almost catched up to the word count aim of today. I got 8.052 words today, and the aim in the calendar shows me I should have 8335, if I was to write an equal port of word every day. So I am short of less than 300 words before the weekend, I am set up with a pushy software, that teases and nags me to write, once I sit down and start. I would say, I am pretty well set to finish this time, if I keep up with the speed and discipline. So far it has not been too hard. With my average writing speed, 3334 word a day can be done in 1 - 1 1/2 hours.

Well, lets not talk of the content, I guess, I am more on the cheesy side there. However, it is fun, and I added the first facepalm after the first 7758 words.

There has been kissing, biting and sucking, but noone has died yet. I can tell you, however, that one or two tax bureaucrats will die a violent and painful death very soon. In my novel. Oh yes.

The first days were pretty okay. Today is the first day where I dropped out of discipline/workflow. What is the best approach to this, I believe, is to sit down. And just write. What helps me with that is a very wide understanding of how my story is going to develop itself. I thought my story line would be too thin, but to describe wht I want, I actually need far more words than I initially thought. Maybe I have to many introspective - but hey, editing is for december. so for now I am going to stick with what I write in the flow. And in a few weeks I will see if it makes sense.

A very good tip is to use Write or Die, an online editor which nags you if you don't keep up with a certain writing speed. Its really hard to loose yourself in your own thought and your fears of probably getting to easy-writing or cheesy, if the consequence will be awful sounds. It also exists as an Adobe Air-based desktop app.

Right now I am really looking forward to killing my main character. And a few bureaucrats in the tax office, and maybe also some cry-baby drunk sexists. Yay, writing rocks. But the real fun will begin when I get to the SciFi parts of my story.

I vår avsluttet jeg en test av ulike serverbaserte publiseringsverktøy til bibliotek, og skrev en rapport. Jeg testet, med hjelp av andre bibliotekarer, tre forskjellige fri programvare CMS: Drupal, Joomla og WordPress.

Siden den gangen har min og andres erfaring bekreftet resultatene. Jeg vil gjerne publisere den, for å muligens få tilbakemelding på den. Kan hende jeg har oversett noe, eller andre kan bruke min fremgangsmåte eller noe av resultatene i sin arbeid.

Her er rapporten til nedlasting i PDF-format:evaluering av ulike publiseringsverktøy

Last years NaNoWriMo did not really work out for me, since I was moving to another country and starting a new job. My living situtation in november 2008 was kind of improvised, and everything was overwhelming and - a lot.

This year, despite having a lot of work and other projects, I am giving it another shot. I even plan the plot ahead and draft some characters. I might cheat and start writing beforehand, but hey - drafting is allowed. I am really looking forward to it. I know that it takes time to write and plot and put in words all the thoughts, feelings and sensations for a text to become a good novel. But I think writing together with tens of thousands of eager writers in the whole world, them experiencing the same situation as I am, is very motivating. And if my novel is no good, well. There is always editing. And learning from the experience...

I think I will update my progress on the NaNoWriMo site, but I don't know if I will follow up on my blog as well. Probably, but I don't want to put the pressure up too much.

NaNoWriMo spells out "National Novel Writing Month", a yearly event that has engaged writers in the U.S. a t first, but soon led to many people in all the world participating and writing. The goal is to write 50.000 words in 30 days. No matter how. The goal is to reach this number, and editing - as they say - is for december.