I know it’s a little early to call this race, but the month is already almost half over and just look at these stats:
I can’t even say I got off to a good start because I didn’t manage to update on the first day, though that wasn’t entirely my fault. True, I had been up late the night before celebrating Halloween, but I was all set to start writing my novel the next evening (I’m a night owl) when recent problems I’d been having with my internet connection came to a head. Not only did I lose internet altogether and have to have someone from my cable company come out the following day, making it impossible for me to update my word count on the NaNo website, I was obliged to get my house tidied up in a hurry, which precluded sitting down for a few minutes to write.
The next day my internet was back again and I managed to write a few words and update on November 2nd but I wasn’t happy with the result. I began rethinking my decision to write a fantasy novel, as the only ideas I seemed to keep having were for a completely unrelated project. So I took a day to think about it while my cable wire was being replaced (during which time I was without internet again for a few hours) and once again missed an update. Over the next few days I made a halfhearted attempt to continue and even wrote over a thousand words on the ninth but I just wasn’t feeling it. So I think I’ll have to pass this year. Perhaps I’ll give Camp NaNoWriMo a try in April ’24.
And also a happy Inktober to all my artist friends. For anyone unaware, Preptober is a NaNoWriMo thing, and if you don’t know what that is, stick around. You’ll find out more than you probably would ever want to since I’m definitely participating in it next month. It’s one of the reasons I started this site and its companion writeblr, after all. Call it one final attempt to bring back that old community feeling now that I’ve turned my back on all traditional social media.
I actually had a very long and involved dream about this very thing last night. In the dream I was perusing the many awesome sites that have sprung up on Neocities.org and I also had a cool website of my own. But best of all, we had formed a community that was small and close-knit and not plagued by toxic personalities as most online communities are these days. I almost never have wish fulfillment dreams, so this was a nice treat. But better yet it was also, in my opinion, achievable. I just need to set aside more time to work on my website, though that will likely not happen until after November since I’ll be devoting almost all my free time to writing a novel!
And on that note, if any of you are participating in NaNoWriMo this year and need a buddy, that’s what I’m here for! Just visit my profile to send me a buddy request and I’ll accept it (as long as you’re not a racist or a homophobe or a transphobe). Happy writing!
A while ago when I first tried to make a living as an indie author I started a thing on the site formerly known as Twitter that I ended up calling the #DailyK. The “K” stood for one thousand, just like in Kilobytes, but it referred to a thousand words. The idea behind it was simple. Every day, without fail (barring any extreme emergencies of course), you set some time aside to write at least 1,000 words. It could be for any project. In fact, I’m counting this blog post as part of my Daily K today.
The second part of #DailyK was optional. It was simply to use that hashtag in a tweet or any other social media type of post to share with the world something about what you wrote that day as part of your Daily K, whether an excerpt or just how you felt while writing, and if you were so inclined, to include your word count for that day, whether you met the goal or exceeded it, or even if you fell short. The purpose was not only to foster a sense of online community amongst writers, since such posts inevitably resulted in likes, comments, and shares, but also to motivate yourself and at the same time encourage others to write.
It’s also great for those times when you have writer’s block, because rather than trying to come up with something you feel like you should be writing, for whatever reason, the idea is to write anything. Anything that comes to mind, for that purpose, even if it’s non-fictional and you normally write fiction. Even if it’s just a grocery list! Of course, I recommend it be a grocery wish list since then it’s bound to be longer. But I used to write lists all the time to help me order my thoughts and those can be creative, too. For example, once as a teenager I decided I wanted to change my whole look so I wrote out a list of the types of clothing I would wear, what my hairstyle would be, and so on. I ended up not using it for that purpose, but I did eventually use it to create a new original character for a story!
So today as I sat down at my keyboard thinking of what I would blog about next, it hit me–why not bring back #DailyK? It will not only be good for me, but good for my fellow writers if it catches on, not to mention good for all their readers (and potential readers). After all, I have nothing to lose by doing so! I hope you’ll join me in this fun and productive exercise. Leave a comment below if you do (this, too, is of course optional), and don’t forget to use the #DailyK hashtag in your social media posts to spread the word!
And that’s 480 words so far (not including these… or the title of the post). I’m already almost halfway to my #DailyK!
I have a confession to make. I’ve been putting off creating my Neocities website. It’s been a while since I’ve created a site, because like most of you I’ve made my home over the last decade or so on various social media platforms for which even customisation of the profile page has become a thing of the past–or else, as in the case of certain types like my Tumblr and this WordPress blog, I’ve become accustomed to simply choosing one of the pre-made templates referred to as a “theme”. So my hesitation stemmed from a reluctance to start something when I had no ready-formed concept in my head which to build upon. I suppose you could liken it to the writer who is unwilling to sit there staring at a blank page before they have an idea for a story. But the thing is, sometimes that’s exactly what you need to do in order to get one!
Anyway, eventually I said to myself, “Self… why don’t you at least log in and see what it’s all about? Then you can blog about it.” So that’s exactly what I did. And here’s what I saw:
The first thing that struck me was that there was no WYSIWYG editor. That’s not a criticism. I’m not sitting here like some self-entitled a-hole throwing up my hands going, “Where is my WYSIWYG? What kind of place are you running here?” It’s just that I know that the goal of Neocities is, as Wikipedia has it, “to revive the support of free web hosting of the now-defunct GeoCities,” so my expectation was based on my memory of using that service. Yes, dear Reader, I am that old.
Now don’t get me wrong, I think that everyone should learn to code. But most people aren’t going to be bothered trying to if they haven’t already for some other reason, so users of Neocities are not likely to be your typical social media junkies and that’s fine with me. And on a more personal note, it kind of resolved my hesitation to start because well, now I had an excuse to take it slow. It’s been ages since I’ve coded a website and HTML has changed a bit since then. I think we’re on version 5 now? I’m being facetious of course, but it does feel like I’ve become a bit rusty.
Anyway, as one of my all-time favourite authors, J. R. R. Tolkien, put it: “It’s the job that’s never started as takes longest to finish” (Samwise Gamgee; The Lord of the Rings, Bk. II, Chp. 7*). So I decided to at least get a colour scheme going, and what could be easier than swiping the one I’ve got right here (apologies to the creators of the Livro theme)? All I needed to do was change the colour attributes that were already there, typed in for me by the creators of Neocities, and then add some a-link customisation code I grabbed from the W3C website, and change those colour attributes as well.
Then later I decided to replace the default image also, but I didn’t have one ready to upload so I thought back to my GeoCities days and remembered that there’s still a website that offers up different graphics which count down the days to Halloween (ILoveHalloween.com). All you have to do is grab their code and plug it in, so that’s what I did. Obviously I still have a long way to go toward finishing the website, but to quote another wise author, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” (Laozi, Tao Te Ching, , Chapter 64).
Back in the day Wikplayer (and later SCM Music Player) was all the rage on Tumblr and other sites with profiles you could edit the HTML of. I can’t remember why we all eventually adopted SCM in place of Wikplayer, but I tried adding one of those to my Tumblr yesterday and it didn’t work, which is when I remembered SCM and tried that instead.
Success! Sort of. I tried to make it play automatically in Firefox but that particular feature didn’t work, so I changed it to the default player that has to be activated by the user pushing the play button. Probably for the best. Also, I couldn’t get it to work in Chrome at all. But nobody should be using Chrome anyway.
The visual theme of my Tumblr by the way, is one they offer for free. I figured it was appropriate in light of the growing nostalgia for the Old Web which is currently centered around Neocities, which many see as a welcome alternative to sailing the treacherous seas of social media; a sheltering cove, if I may extend the metaphor.
This blog is being created in concert with a Neocities site (under construction) and a “writeblr” Tumblr blog in an attempt to recreate the sort of community I once enjoyed when Twitter was still… well, Twitter. I hope you’ll join me for this exciting endeavour (I tend to use the British spellings for most words despite being an American), especially as National Novel Writing Month approaches, since I have a rather ambitious project in mind and will need all the writing buddies I can get. In my next post I’ll tell you a little more about myself, but in the meantime if you have any questions or just want to say hi feel free to leave a comment!