NaNo, Day 19: misc notes

Something I should have given more weight to, when deciding whether to do NaNo this year, was the fact that I had to abandon my usual monthly word-count metric during FFG because the pressure of having to hit that many words was near-paralyzing me (in much the same way other people say perfectionism paralyzes them). I'm getting over it now, but I think a lot of the mid-month dive in productivity can be attributed to that.

I'm still working to catch up from Day 13's no-writing, and the surrounding days' less-than-quota output. The numbers are at least going in the right direction.

I went to a write-in Thursday, day 15. It was a good move. While I don't do the "word sprints" or other games/challenges -- that sort of thing just doesn't work for me -- it is easier to focus when you're surrounded by a bunch of other people typing industriously away. It also makes it easier to resist the temptation to bring up Minesweeper. ;-) I got a decent chunk of words done at the write-in, and I've been hitting quota or better since.

One of the difficulties has been that I leave that last chunk of writing for, well, last, and then somehow it's midnight and I still haven't done it. Saturday I determined to do better, and put in several sessions earlier in the day, so that come evening I only needed another 250 words. And then housework ran late, and dinner, and an extra ep of TV because the cats were too cute to move, and suddenly it was one in the morning and I still hadn't sat down for that final session. Argh.

Sunday I went to another write-in, largely because I needed to get out of the physical environment that Saturday's scheduling debacle happened in. Wasn't sure that was really where I wanted to go, but I didn't have a better idea. It took me quite a while to get going, but once I did it was a good move again. Got most of my day's words done there -- and at least I finished the final at-home session at midnight! It's an improvement.

Of the days I've done quota or better so far, there's only been one where it took me less than four hours.

Aside from word count, I'm not happy with how the book is going. I don't think it's going to have the charm of the first one, and I think it's going to need a lot more revising. The first one was full of sesquipidalian vocabulary and jokes about collective nouns; this one's got the vocabularic variety of a skipping record. And for all it made sense at the time, it turns out competent ninjas aren't nearly as entertaining as incompetent ones. And I got distracted and didn't end up having the characters set fire to the thing. I'm hoping the flying ferrets will make up for some of it.

As for today, I'm less than 200 shy of quota as I type this, and I would rather stick my cerebrum on a grinding wheel than keep writing, even though I think what I've done today is reasonably decent. I'm going to take a short break, and then get back to the writing before this turns into another 200-at-2-am debacle.

Hardware Update

Skippy the Streambook had his first outing yesterday.

I haven't quite finished setting him up yet, which led to some interesting delays as I adjusted settings and kept finding more built-in crap to turn off. I suspect I'll be doing that for quite some time, as I keep discovering more things that Micro$oft wants to "help" me with and having to go digging to shut them down. Windows 10 is being quite an experience; at first it was like having to learn to use a computer all over again, but I'm staring to get the hang of it.

So Skippy went to the write-in. Results were mixed. The battery life is excellent; five hours untethered, much of it with the wifi going, and the battery was only down to about 71%. On the down side, I kept getting save errors; I suspect the "out of memory or drive space" was Windows monopolizing the system resources with some update or process I hadn't asked for. (Wonder if the library's woefully slow internet contributed to that? It hasn't done it at home.) Hopefully continued turning off of things behind the scenes will help with that.

I did not, when deciding that the rather petite hard drive would be okay, take into account that Windows would eat half of it. Or more than half, but there's still some 7 gigs free. And I never meant to keep much data on the hard drive anyway; a small-size-high-capacity USB drive is definitely in the near future.

The keyboard worked very nicely, however. Quite comfortable to write on, and there's enough tactile feedback that I felt reasonably confident of my key contact. The extremely low profile of the machine means that it's comfortable for extended typing even without something to prop up the back edge for a better angle. The screen, which was very hard on my eyes in our poorly-lit living room, didn't bother me a bit under the library's fluorescents.

(And it's a good thing I did break down and get a backup machine, as the main "work" laptop was unusable last night. No keyboard I can work around; a keyboard that constantly types "eeeeeeee" by itself is more of an obstacle.)

Overall, I think Skippy will be fine for what he is, though putting Windows 10 on a machine of such limited capacity was an act of wild overoptimism on someone's part.