(no subject)

[julesjones]

It's PicoWriMo time. :-)I missed the first couple of days, because the comm is on LiveJournal and the RSS feed to DreamWidth has broken at some point in the last few weeks, so I didn't know it was on this month until a friend mentioned it. It's a small comm for people who like the idea of NaNoWriMo (RIP), but can't do 50k in a month. People set their own target, and share their progress, so we get the community support for something that's manageable for us.

 

First week's progress for me:

1/3/26

2/3/26
Well, my writing work for the evening seems to have been to work out why the feed to DreamWidth isn't working and ask the DW help elves to look into it.
I don't look at LiveJournal any more, so the only way I know a session is starting is via the feed to DreamWidth. Except the feed has broken at some point in the last month, so the only reason I knew it was PicoWriMo time is because a friend mentioned it on Mastodon. :-(

3/3/26
Having decided that it's 15 minutes of Doing Things or 150 words this month, the 15 minutes was digging through the "writing on the bus" notebook collection looking for sections that still need to be added to the electronic file.

4/3/26
Today's 15 minutes of Writing Tasks That Must Be Done was talking to my occasional writing partner about filing a claim for our book that's in the list of titles included in the Anthropic settlement, which she hadn't known about. That bit didn't take the full 15 minutes, but I'm going to count the rest of the writing-related conversation anyway.

5/3/26
Only thing of use I did was download and install the latest update to Scrivener, the writing software I use now that I have abandoned my dearly beloved Lotus Word Pro. It's a very powerful tool with a lot of features well beyond a simple word processor, which is why I have inevitably forgotten how to use whenever if I haven't used it for a few months.

6/3/26
Read through the electronic file of the next WIP in the queue of things that got halted after the chronic migraine took me out for several years. There is a *lot* that is still on dead tree waiting to be transferred. That will have to be done before new words happen, because I've lost track of what's still only in my head and what's actually on dead tree. I don't want to write it twice...

7/3/26
300 words transferred from the paper notebook to the Scrivener file, after the usual "Help I don't remember how to use this software!!!" It was very slow going, so definitely racked up my 15 minutes. I would like to fire up Dragon, as I can probably copy-type faster with that than with the keyboard, but my computer is being Extremely Annoying and I'm not sure it can handle Dragon now without falling over. Onward....

Comments

[heleninwales]

Sympathies re the "Help I don't remember how to use this software!!!" I've had that problem in the past, usually with something that I had to use infrequently and so it took a very long time to get sufficient repeats of the process for it to stick.

Re Scrivener, I looked at that a few years ago but decided it was overkill for my needs. I use a writing program called yWriter which is good for the actual writing and early revision stages, though I'll transfer the finished novel to the word processor for final polishing.

[julesjones]

I thought it was overkill when I first looked at it, but that was at a time when I was using Lotus Word Pro. Then I finally had to move to MS Word because it got just too difficult to keep Lotus going as I changed machines and Windows versions. And then I went "Isn't there a special offer for Scrivener during NaNoWriMo?"

I have actually found some of the tools very useful, and worth paying to get something that is Not Word but can output into Word format,