Please hold, I have Audrey Niffenegger’s attorneys on the line…
Anyway, I have a question for you NaNoWriMo participants. What do you do if you don’t have Word on your computer? Annoyingly, I don’t have any word processing software on my computer and Microsoft wants something like $150 for Word. (Remember the days when you got Office for free, preinstalled on your computer? Who knew that those would be the golden years?)
Can anyone recommend something fairly cheap and reliable? Can I really type up 50,000 words in a Google document or will I kill myself first?
If you want something fully featured along the lines of Word, try OpenOffice (though I haven’t tried it myself). For something simpler, I’ve had no complaints about RoughDraft. I’m sure there are many other free alternatives. No reason to pay anything.
I haven’t used of them personally, so no recommendations, but there are a number of MS Word clones out there for free. I did a Google search on “MS word clone” and got hits on several different ones. Again, nothing that I have used, so I can’t make a recommendation, but perhaps someone else here can…
I used Works last year- it at least has a word count and I figured if I ever get a real processor, I’ll just cut/paste my work. But thanks for the Rough Draft link- I’ll try that this year.
What sucks is I have Word Perfect Family Pack- but no authentication code since we threw away the box :smack:.
Yeah, I’m in again this year. I’m PaleoGamer on NaNoWriMo. My attempt last year failed miserably but I think I’ve got a better handle on a plot this time around so I may actually be able to finish something. (Last year I had an opening and not much else.)
And I second (third, whatever) Open Office. It’s all I use anymore.
I signed in this morning. I don’t really have any ideas, other than a general annoyance over many other half-finished projects. I may lock a character in a basement and give her nothing to do but finish old projects. And keep a journal. I may give her a head injury to confuse things.
You know, you don’t need the latest version of MS Word even with Vista, and presumably 7; I use word 2002 on Vista without problems. Look on eBay, Amazon and Half.com for Office 2002/2003 or an older version of Microsoft Works Suite (2006 or older) and you can probably score a copy that will contain MS Word 2002 for less than $25.
How does this work? It seems like a lot of people here have won. How many people can win in a given year? What sort of claim to your intellectual property do you retain after participating?
Dang missed the edit window. I wanna put in my plug for something that helped me tremendously with WeSeWriMo (like NaNo but for serialized web fiction): Write or Die, which is a web app whereby you can set up a timer and a wordcount and you’re basically forced to keep going lest you get punished.
So you can, say, decide that you want to type 1200 words in a half hour. If you pause for too long, you’ll either a) hear an annoying noise such as Rick Astley, or b) on the ‘Kamikaze’ mode, your words will be eaten away one by one!
The added punishment if you pause really helped me.
And now there’s a desktop edition for $10 that adds “wordwar,” a one-on-one contest where you can challenge someone else to see who’ll reach his/her goal faster, and some other cool options such as disallowing the backspace key (great for preventing too much editing!) and saving to an existing document.
Using Write or Die forces you to produce stuff without self-editing, which for perfectionists/procrastinators like me makes this a true lifesaver. And no, I’m not affiliated with the site. FYI, you need about 1667 words a day in order to reach 50K.
There is a word count validator- you cut and paste your work and after the month is over, they delete it on their side. It’s more of a personal challenge than an actual contest, but if you win you get the code for the winner web badge and some other winner stuff (that you can buy, but it’s cheap and for the purpose of keeping Nano going).
Also, the forums are really cool and I am going to our kickoff party this Friday to meet with the other local Nanos. Not sure if the social part will work for me, but am going to give it a try!
I think I’m gonna give it a shot this year. I have the story all plotted out and ready to go, just needed an excuse to really dig in. This is as good as any, really. I tried once a few years back and dropped out after a couple days. Not very impressive. I can’t get the “quantity over quality, LOTS of quantity” thing.
Won in '07, participated without winning in '08, participating without taking it very seriously this year. I just have too much to do this November to seriously contemplate trying to write 50,000 words…plus, I like what I’m writing too much; I’d rather write it slowly than force it out and hate the result. So, I’m just going to make a stab at finishing my '08 story.
I’m writing a fairly standard “adventures in college” story with a slight Greg House twist, in the main character is a self-centered prick, and since her sections are told in first-person omniscience we get to see that she’s pretty much an outright sociopath. The problem I’m having is that while her hijinks correctly come out as comedic in the chapters told from other characters’ points of view, the reader’s insight into her thoughts during her POV chapters has thus-far rendered her almost completely unlikeable, and every time I write new material I have to actively resist the temptation to go back and try to re-write her internal monologues to make her into a bit less of a bastard.
I roadtripped to the city where my story is taking place yesterday (8 hours roundtrip). I’d never been to the town, Ortonville, MN, and I’ve got a better idea of how the story’s gonna unfold. Good luck everyone!
