Back on the Horse

I went almost a week without writing. It's hard to have a steady habit. But I'm back again today. Just got to keep trying. Up to 19,173 words today, with a goal of 100,000 words. Given how far along the story is, it feels like I'll need 200,000, but we'll see how things go.

Here's my writing set up. I've tried a bunch of different software, like Scrivener (love the idea, but can't run it on linux - at least not the most recent version, and a little less flexible/programmable than I'd like). I've tried microsoft word, but it quickly becomes unwieldy. I'm a bit nerdy (sci-fi writer, duh), and I love programming, so I like being able to write text files that I can edit from the command line, or use linux programs like grep to search.

If you're not a programmer, and none of that last paragraph makes sense to you, no worries, I think it's pretty non-essential. You should write with whatever system works for you, this is just what I enjoy. Currently I use atom as my text editor with some modifications that work with writing. This includes an add-on that can automatically word count a file "wordcount". I also have another add-on called "typewriter" that lets me position my writing the way I want it. No highlighting on currently for markup, but I might change that later.

I like using markdown incidentally to style my text. I enclose different sections in html tags, e.g. for a scene where my character goes to therapy, I enclose the scene in tags like this:

Just a quick way for me to make my text easily searchable. I've also tried adding hash tags like #info when I have info that I'll need to look up later.

Last week was Thanksgiving week. I find it very hard to keep up a habit when I'm on vacation and away from home. I just try to come back to the habit when I'm settled into my routine again.

Time spent writing today: 24 minutes
Time spent writing so far: 37.6 hours (wrote for 1.2 hours yesterday too).
Number of naps today: 0. But I'm hoping to go to bed soon.