Friday Forays In Fiction: NaNo Status

I hope not to take to long of a detour here tonight as I just, in the last couple hours, got back into the word gushing mode on my NaNo novel, Mobile Hopes. So I took a quick screen shot with which to head this brief update. I'm way behind in word count but in spite of what yesterday's post might have implied, I refuse to panic. I know I tend to start slow on any project I engage. And I know what happens if I stick with it.

The screen shot shows the windows of the application I am using. If you right click to open it in a new tab or window you'll see more details. The right side shows the topic window currently selected. I could type and edit directly in that window but I only do that for small edits and dropping a copy/paste or a link.

When I am writing more than a few lines I work in the editor window which you can see peeking out there at the far left. The editor window can have multiple topics in a tabbed arrangement that I can bounce back and forth between. They can be from any of the dozens of WhizFolders I've created but when I'm working on Mobile Hopes I try to keep only topics from the novel's WhizFolder open. Though I do occasionally have some topics from my Story Garden WhizFolder open in the editor for ease of referral.

Story Garden is my story play ground for incubating stories and where I collect advice and inspiration from other writers on the writing life and the theory of fiction: plot, theme, character, setting etc.

The left side of the WhizFolder windows show the topic lists which are nested in a hierarchy that I control. I can move any topic around the list at will too. I have most of the parent topics closed so as to fit them all into the picture. If they were all open you would see some of them going three to five levels deep.

As you can see also, I am able to color code the topic names. One of the benefits of this is to see at a glance where the material that qualifies for the word count is. I gave them royal blue. When it is time to see where the total count is, I just select all the royal blue topics and then go to the tools menu for the word count tool. For counting words in single topics I just use the F6 key.

We're supposed to be at 11,669 words by the end of day seven. I'm still under 5K. Sigh.