Ever since Marie wanted to learn to program in 2009, I’ve wanted to write a book to help her. But I never could get started.
The National Novel Writing Month is November every year for just this purpose: to motivate people to put 50,000 words on paper (about the size of the novel, Slaughterhouse-Five), editor be damned.
I first heard about it in 2007, when I started using Scrivener, but dismissed it because the requirement that a novel be fiction. I only just found about NaNo Rebels, which allows you to customize the “50,000 words” into nearly any other creative exercise, including non-fiction. So yesterday, this was born:
![NaNoWriMo 2016 Participant](https://i0.wp.com/farm6.staticflickr.com/5736/30703644106_87c92bd16c_t.jpg?resize=500%2C500&ssl=1)
Nowadays, I use Ulysses. I simply created a group in the software and set a 50,000 word goal and started typing away!
![NaNoWriMo 2016 Day 2](https://i0.wp.com/farm6.staticflickr.com/5834/30108776604_c4673b176d_t.jpg?resize=640%2C480&ssl=1)
Goal setting on my iPad.
I don’t know if I can finish since it’s about a good sized blog article each and every day. We’ll see how it goes. So far it’s been a bit strange writing a book. For instance, I can’t use my WordPress shortcode macros lest I ruin the word count.
Periodically, I’ll dump the output to my blog, which you can track here. Wish me luck!
If you want to buddy up, I’m “tychay” there.