For those unaware, November is National Novel Writing Month.

I'm posting this now, to give folks that might be interested a heads up. A bit of time in which to come up with at least a bare bones plot prior to the beginning of the month. And a bit of time to clear schedules if need be. I have personally been meaning to participate for the last couple years, but mysteriously forget about it until mid month at which point it's a tad late to write 50 thousand words.

And despite the name, it really isn't national any longer, as there are writers in a great deal of countries and continents that take part in the festivities.

For more information: http://www.nanowrimo.org/

Don't know what I'm going to write, perhaps something with zombies.

I know a few friends who do this,
I keep meaning to give it a go but until I find that time-compressor it's going to be a bit tricky.

Out of curiosity: What prog do you write in?
Pen+paper and type it up later?
Word? (aarrgghh)
Notepad?
Or one of those nice distraction-free full screen calming green on black progs?
Or a 'novel writing software' a la Scrivener/Storyist to plan it all out?

I haven't thought too much about the program. I will be using a screen writing program called Save The Cat for the initial planning stage where I make the basic decisions about plot, but I'm not sure what I'm going to use for the actual writing itself.

At this point, I have basically a month to find something better than a simple word processor. Worst case, I'll use something like Libreoffice and a new file every chapter. I definitely will be using the versioning feature as I do want to be able to track changes over time.

EDIT: I did find ywriter which appears to be more or less exactly what I need. Plus it's written by somebody who actually writes novels. http://www.spacejock.com/yWriter.html

Nanowrimo is here again? Wow.

Well, in about 30 days. Unless my TARDIS malfunctioned and it's November 1st instead of October 1st.

I've been doing it two years in a row as a NaNo Rebel (did short story collections in the Creative Nonfiction genre) and it's a total blast. My personal weapon of choice is Scrivener (which just came out with a Windows version not too long ago); out of all of the alternatives I've tried (namely Mariner Software's StoryMill) it's the most powerful and easiest to use.

The developer hosts a yearly promo for Scrivener during NaNoWriMo where he gives all NaNo participants a build (or was it a code?) of Scrivener that's fully unlocked for the month of November; on top of that he gives a significant discount on the price of Scrivener for NaNo participants, and an even deeper discount for NaNo winners.

Pardon my ignorance, but what do those "writing software" things do that a Notepad can't?

I did not know about this. I have written anything in years but I might try to think something up.

"Author-centric" word processors include specific features for character notes, plot outlining, daily goal setting, word counting, project management, draft-tallying, version control and other bells and whistles which, while possible in something like LibreOffice write or similar are not actively support by such.

Personally I use notepad precisely for its *lack* of bells and whistles. This year I am going to try to use Focuswriter which seems to blend some word counting and goal-setting functionality with a distraction free interface.

Ahh.. I wonder if any writers use WikidPad.

I make notes in WikidPad

I also keep my daily work journal in it. It's one of my favourite pieces of software of all time.

It's probably not something you want to be writing an actual novel in though, for organisational reasons. It *is* however where you want to keep your research for exactly the same reasons.

Well I find it a silly idea overall, but then again I'm experienced with writing and find the idea of writing a 50K word novel just for a silly contest not really worth my time, considering I'm already working on a novel that's hitting the 40k words and will most likely be three or four times that length by when I'm done with it :P

That's one of the things I hadn't thought of initially and one of the reasons I'm bringing this topic up a full month in advanced. A good program will allow you to describe various locales, characters and items and keep track of them separate from the actual story. Helping to reduce embarrassing mistakes where you accidentally load a magazine into your revolver having forgotten that it was a six shooter on page 39.

I'm sure it's not the only way, but it's also nice to know that if something doesn't appear in the list of items to track, that it probably needs to be barely mentioned, even if you're in love with the description for it.

Who doesn't have a rough outline of a 4 book series just lying around in a notepad dedicated only for writing it? That's pretty much everyone.

Right?

I call it "the office-burning series" and if written it will involve spontaneous conflagrations in the offices of bloated game publishers.

I think the trilogy is the usual thing... but I take your point.