Ramblings

Bloviating: to you, from me. Chide me if you will. algot@runeman.org

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Thu, 06 Nov 2014

NaNoWri-NO-Mo

It is National Novel Writing Month again, November. Again, I hear about others who are attempting to write 50,000 words in a month. Again, I am not doing it. My attention span is short. It is a matter of dipping into something for a while and then dipping into something else for another while. Writing 50,000 words about one thing is too daunting for me.

Not that shorter writing is much easier. Look at the gap since the last entry of this blog. Sad and overlooked, too. Which isn't to say that my days have been empty. I do participate in the Word of the Day forum at the Internet Book Database of Fiction IBDoF WotD which takes some time in the morning. Preparing the daily word, which I grab mainly from Oxford Dictionaries Online frequently involves creating an illustration in Inkscape or selecting an image from Flickr. If I use a Flickr image, then I try to make sure to stay with Creative Commons liberal use licenses like the CC-By Attribution license. That license lets me create links back to the Flickr source page for the image that gets used.

Today's word was "ullage", the empty space in a container when something gets sold. This is the image I made in Inkscape.

The word also goes to the Natick Patch bulletin board. There is a banner image in addition to the one incorporated into the WotD itself.

To encourage myself to do daily writing, there is an entry to a journal, well most days. It incorporates ideas that come up during the day. I'm writing in a text editor and using document conversion programs to make the text easy to change into several formats, HTML, EPUB and PDF. The primary conversion program is called Pandoc. With a bit of command-line automation, I write the daily journal entries, run a simple command and have three nicely-formatted versions of the journal ready to go.

I'm not actually publishing the journal, but the practice I'm getting may eventually cross over into actual published stuff. We'll see.