To my NaNoWriMo peeps:

Hello fellow sufferers novelists!

So far, if you’ve been looking at my word counts, you’ll see that I officially have bupkus to show. That’s not entirely accurate – I did write some today, but haven’t posted the word count yet because I want to get some more in before I go to sleep. I admit that I didn’t even start writing today until I found a LaTeX fiction class I like for typesetting instead of using Microsoft Word like I have in the past. If you’re not a geek, LaTeX is a typesetting language which produces beautiful documents – click here for more information. The beauty of it is that if I later want to make it look like a finished book, I can just switch the class I’m using and tweak some things. I still swear you could write a bogus paper on, say, flatulence, and if typeset it with LaTeX and submitted it to the right conferences (in the sense of “the wrong conferences”, if you know what I mean), it would be accepted simply because it looks like a published paper.

Yes, I’m a geek. Silly things make me happy. I’m not recommending this to anyone

I went to LaTeX this year because I like my writing to look pretty on top of whatever content it provides (I find it to be good motivation), and I already know how to use it (it’s got a learning curve, but is heavily used in scientific conferences and journals with which I have some experience), so when I found there were a bunch of classes/styles for doing novel manuscripts, I decided it was a fun challenge for this year. (N.B.: For reference, I’m using sffms, specifically with the pretty non-submission option (see this example for a glimpse at what it looks like), and you can sue me if you don’t like it… after so many years in CS, I like to be able to use my skillz whenever possible </brag>)

Also, like all good NaNos, I like to procrastinate, and this was a good way to do so. It works like a charm now, though, so I guess I have to write the thing after all…

I’ll be catching up tomorrow after I do the whole world of hospital preregistration in the morning (aaaaack!). I had to do this catching up thing a lot with the last NaNo I really participated in as well because I was working and commuting for an obscene number of hours a day. Yesterday, frankly, I was too deep into the heavily-pregnant-brand-of-tired to do anything, let alone write.

So here I am, it’s about midnight, and I’m going to write for an hour or so before I crash. Then, tomorrow, it’s time for hardcore catchup and buffering of extra words for the next time I’m pass-out-on-the-couch tired

(Oh, and btw, congrats to my writing buddy Lizzy, who is a) superawesome, and b) totally keeping on track! Karen and Bridget, let us know how it’s going! )