Skip to main content

NaNoWriMo 2014: Days 2 and 3

Yesterday I did my best to make up some of the time I lost in an opening day that knocked some of my pride out. I wrote a lot slower than I had anticipated on Saturday and I didn't expect that to change, so I took advantage of a Sunday with little plans to take up my time and had three writing sessions.

I wrote around each meal, so three through the day. My son took it upon himself to join me for two of them, and he got a little distracted when he learned what text formatting was in his word processor (Google Docs) but setup upon himself a goal of three sentences a day as a minimum, and more if he more ideas. This is a good goal for an eight year old writer.

There is a line I have to walk where I'm not encouraging him enough on one side and I'm just trying to push him because I want to share writing with him on the other. He didn't want to write on Monday, but I let it slide because of the balance I need to keep on that line.

I ended yesterday above schedule, but I'm basically on par today with 5058 words on a day when 5000 would be the goal. 58 words over barely count, so keeping ahead is going to mean a chance of pace. My plan is a 30 minute writing session in the morning after my morning pages, which can hopefully help me hit 2000 words every day.

Today I sought out a piece in my reading queue on writing and I found an interview with Stephen King on writing first lines. This is good, because I don't have a first line yet.

Open a book in the middle of a dramatic or compelling situation, because right away you engage the reader's interest. This is what we call a "hook," and it's true, to a point.
 I encourage anyone with the interest to read it, and anything else King ever has to say on writing.

See all my posts about NaNoWriMo 2014

Comments

Tektonick said…
Could you please send *just* the Python posts to the Planet Python RSS feed?

Popular posts from this blog

CARDIAC: The Cardboard Computer

I am just so excited about this. CARDIAC. The Cardboard Computer. How cool is that? This piece of history is amazing and better than that: it is extremely accessible. This fantastic design was built in 1969 by David Hagelbarger at Bell Labs to explain what computers were to those who would otherwise have no exposure to them. Miraculously, the CARDIAC (CARDboard Interactive Aid to Computation) was able to actually function as a slow and rudimentary computer.  One of the most fascinating aspects of this gem is that at the time of its publication the scope it was able to demonstrate was actually useful in explaining what a computer was. Could you imagine trying to explain computers today with anything close to the CARDIAC? It had 100 memory locations and only ten instructions. The memory held signed 3-digit numbers (-999 through 999) and instructions could be encoded such that the first digit was the instruction and the second two digits were the address of memory to operate on

Statement Functions

At a small suggestion in #python, I wrote up a simple module that allows the use of many python statements in places requiring statements. This post serves as the announcement and documentation. You can find the release here . The pattern is the statement's keyword appended with a single underscore, so the first, of course, is print_. The example writes 'some+text' to an IOString for a URL query string. This mostly follows what it seems the print function will be in py3k. print_("some", "text", outfile=query_iostring, sep="+", end="") An obvious second choice was to wrap if statements. They take a condition value, and expect a truth value or callback an an optional else value or callback. Values and callbacks are named if_true, cb_true, if_false, and cb_false. if_(raw_input("Continue?")=="Y", cb_true=play_game, cb_false=quit) Of course, often your else might be an error case, so raising an exception could be useful

How To Teach Software Development

How To Teach Software Development Introduction Developers Quality Control Motivation Execution Businesses Students Schools Education is broken. Education about software development is even more broken. It is a sad observation of the industry from my eyes. I come to see good developers from what should be great educations as survivors, more than anything. Do they get a headstart from their education or do they overcome it? This is the first part in a series on software education. I want to open a discussion here. Please comment if you have thoughts. Blog about it, yourself. Write about how you disagree with me. Write more if you don't. We have a troubled industry. We care enough to do something about it. We hark on the bad developers the way people used to point at freak shows, but we only hurt ourselves but not improving the situation. We have to deal with their bad code. We are the twenty percent and we can't talk to the eighty percent, by definition, so we need to impro