Alone With Everybody
Nov. 11th, 2004 10:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alfvaenI managed to not have to work today--yes, it's a statutory holiday, Remembrance Day, here in Canada as well as in the U.S., but at work we are encouraged to work it anyway, in lieu of another holiday day near Christmas or something, rather than take a day off in the middle of the week. (I was on call anyway, because of the code I wrote yesterday which is to be used in a presentation tomorrow, but didn't get tested by the presenter until today, but luckily things seem to have worked.) I also managed to borrow a laptop from work--an old Hitachi with Windows 95 and a floppy drive but no CD-ROM. I copied gvim onto it via floppy, rather than rely on Wordpad to work on a 90 kilobyte file without accidentally corrupting it. (I like Wordpad well enough as a lightweight editor, but not with large files.)
Both of the above meant that I could attend a NaNoWriMo write-in. Nicole took the kids to visit her sister(who is in the process of replacing her floors with hardwood), and I went to the Denny's near Grant MacEwan with the laptop. I got there at about 1:00, when there was a hugh lunch or brunch crowd, but luckily two NaNoers, one of whom I know from the last couple of years, had already claimed a booth. We had lunch first, and then got out the laptops. Sarah, our Municipal Liaison(?), showed up shortly after that, we snagged another booth, and the laptops came out in earnest.
I was pleasantly surprised to discover that not only did the periodic not slow me down appreciably in my writing, but neither did the laptop keyboard. I hate laptop keyboards, and they often throw off my typing, but apparently I was able to compensate. Most of the problems are, I think, with the crowded arrangements of keys like Delete and such, but using gvim meant that I could use its function keys, which are pretty much all alphanumeric--using Wordpad might have been more painful. I hate the touchpad, though, and wish I could have dredged up an actual serial mouse to plug into it. Several times I accidentally brushed the touchpad and threw the focus into a weird place, until one of the other guys there(who was at 45,000 words, almost finished, already, curse him)showed me how to deactive the "tap" feature.
It was a little after 2:00 by the time I started writing in earnest, and a little after 4:00 when I reached my quota. By that point, there were about eight people there, some of them writing longhand. (I'm now at 17,548 words, in case you're wondering.) That's not much worse than when I'm writing at home, and I suspect that the conversation just took the place of the times when I checked the NaNoWriMo website, or my LJ friends page, or picked up my book and read a page. Several people said they liked my premise(about the sentient suit jacket, riding a neurologically burnt out homeless man, searching for its origins)and the samples I've put up on the NaNo web site, which was nice. The chapter I was working on was one focusing on the suit(named Everett), and I put in some cool stuff. I was trying to spice up a scene where he went to a bank with his new fake IDs, to open an account, and eventually decided, in true "plot ninja" fashion, to have him walk in on a holdup. It was a fun scene to write, which is the whole point.
I don't know how often I'll be able to borrow that laptop(which is normally used as an interface to our voicemail system), or whether I'll attend other write-ins, but it was a fun experience, and shows that writing does not always have to be the loneliest profession.
Both of the above meant that I could attend a NaNoWriMo write-in. Nicole took the kids to visit her sister(who is in the process of replacing her floors with hardwood), and I went to the Denny's near Grant MacEwan with the laptop. I got there at about 1:00, when there was a hugh lunch or brunch crowd, but luckily two NaNoers, one of whom I know from the last couple of years, had already claimed a booth. We had lunch first, and then got out the laptops. Sarah, our Municipal Liaison(?), showed up shortly after that, we snagged another booth, and the laptops came out in earnest.
I was pleasantly surprised to discover that not only did the periodic not slow me down appreciably in my writing, but neither did the laptop keyboard. I hate laptop keyboards, and they often throw off my typing, but apparently I was able to compensate. Most of the problems are, I think, with the crowded arrangements of keys like Delete and such, but using gvim meant that I could use its function keys, which are pretty much all alphanumeric--using Wordpad might have been more painful. I hate the touchpad, though, and wish I could have dredged up an actual serial mouse to plug into it. Several times I accidentally brushed the touchpad and threw the focus into a weird place, until one of the other guys there(who was at 45,000 words, almost finished, already, curse him)showed me how to deactive the "tap" feature.
It was a little after 2:00 by the time I started writing in earnest, and a little after 4:00 when I reached my quota. By that point, there were about eight people there, some of them writing longhand. (I'm now at 17,548 words, in case you're wondering.) That's not much worse than when I'm writing at home, and I suspect that the conversation just took the place of the times when I checked the NaNoWriMo website, or my LJ friends page, or picked up my book and read a page. Several people said they liked my premise(about the sentient suit jacket, riding a neurologically burnt out homeless man, searching for its origins)and the samples I've put up on the NaNo web site, which was nice. The chapter I was working on was one focusing on the suit(named Everett), and I put in some cool stuff. I was trying to spice up a scene where he went to a bank with his new fake IDs, to open an account, and eventually decided, in true "plot ninja" fashion, to have him walk in on a holdup. It was a fun scene to write, which is the whole point.
I don't know how often I'll be able to borrow that laptop(which is normally used as an interface to our voicemail system), or whether I'll attend other write-ins, but it was a fun experience, and shows that writing does not always have to be the loneliest profession.
