Saturday, November 6, 2010

Why OpenOffice Sucks - A NaNoWriMo Blog

I should really be writing my NaNoWriMo novel instead of this blog.

No, seriously. I should REALLY be writing it.

The fact is, I had gotten to about 8,000 words. And now it's all gone.

Every single word.

Stupid file decided to lock me out of itself and then proceed to delete the contents. That's the last time I use stupid OpenOffice.

But let me start from the beginning...

So, a few weeks ago, I needed to type up and print out my lyrics for 'Hogwarts State of Mind'. I was going to record the audio and I wanted easy to read lyrics in front of me to go off of. So, being the poor kid as I am, I used a free option available to me. OpenOffice. Stupid, stupid, OpenOffice.

The thing with OpenOffice is that it integrates itself with most all other text editing programs. Because of that, you can save a document in about a BAJILLION ways. It gets a bit tricky after a while unless you know exactly what you need.

If I had known it would be this much hassle, I wouldn't have even bothered.

Then when November rolled around, I thought, "Oh, hey. I already have a typing program on my computer." And I decided to start work on my NaNoWriMo story. Using OpenOffice.

Which was a big mistake.

So, I'm typing along, and a few days go by. I can just leave the computer in standby for hours at a time and then come back and type more on my story. But then, for some reason, on Wednesday, I decided to save the novel and shut the computer off.

When I booted the computer back up and tried to open the file today, it said something along the lines of me not being able to change the document because another "user" had the file opened. The computer had just booted up and I've worked with computers a while. There was no other "user" keeping the file from me.

When I finally did get the file open, it looked like
###########################################################################
which is not exactly the story arc I was looking for.

After downloading and running three different recovery programs, they all said that there were no contents to the file.

All was lost.

I ran to the store, got Microsoft Office 2010 and installed it. So guess what shiny new program I'll be using tomorrow to catch-up to the people who are cranking out 2,000 words a day? Hint, it's not stupid OpenOffice or whatever.

I'll keep you posted on my NaNo progress and there will (hopefully) be a Q@A video tomorrow! :D

EDIT: People are telling me I should have made more backups, and while it is true that I didn't email the contents to myself, the reason that they all failed-out was because of the way that I saved them. I saved them as a file that had a lock-out backup saved and then when I tried to reopen it, I wasn't the "correct" user to be able to open and edit (or even view, for that matter) the file. But I learned my lesson. I'll backup the contents and send the story to myself as a story, not as an attachment. FIN.

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If you're doing NaNoWriMo, check out some of these books for helpful tips!














Friday, November 5, 2010

Hogwarts State of Mind: The Blog

So, as many of you know, I'm back on the YouTubes again. Posting vids and taking names. Well, more about the posting vids and less about taking names. But I am thanking subscribers. Still. Which can get rather exhausting at times.

But I love you guys. :)

And, as 2,621 of you know, my big comeback video was 'Hogwarts State of Mind', the parody of 'Empire State of Mind'. And it was incredibly well-received, even though Kiera and I are not black rappers.

The confusing thing for me was, that usually, my parody videos do very well in the view counts and, I don't know if it's because I'm getting spoiled with thousands of views on the other videos, or because Empire just isn't a very searched-for song anymore, a view count of 2,000some seems rather low.

I'm probably just spoiled.

Fear not, the views don't matter too much to me. I am happy with each and every one of my views and I'm quite proud of the song/video. I have a few other parody ideas (okay, a lot of parody ideas) and you'll see more of them culminate soon in the future, you have my word.

I plan on dressing up as Malfoy for another parody which will be filmed as soon as December rolls around. The reason for the month-away film date is because this month I am not shaving my face, and, cmon, Malfoy can't grow facial hair to save the Dark Lord.

AND OMFG SO EXCITED FOR HARRY POTTER DH PART 1.

Hogwarts State of Mind

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Wednesday, November 3, 2010

I'm Gonna Be Honest - A NaNoWriMo Blog

Okay, I'm gonna be honest.

I only wrote about 1,000 words last night for my NaNoNovel.

Which, now that I think about it, doesn't actually mean what I meant it to mean. National Novel Novel. Wuud?

ANYWAY, this is not a post to tell you that I'm sorry that I didn't write a lot yesterday. It's not even that I didn't have time. I had plenty of time. I just didn't feel like it. But hey, that's what this weekend is for. I'm off on Saturday and Sunday so I'll try to get it up to 20k words by Monday.

My friends are of the best witnesses to the fact that I work and type well under pressure. I don't think this would be nearly as exciting if I WASN'T behind in the word count. By the last week of NaNo last year, I was still 20k behind. I ended up hashin out 15k of them out on the night before Black Friday (Thanksgiving night). Granted, it took me until about an hour before midnight to hit 50,231 words, but that's another story.

My point is that I'm not going to let my NaNoWriMo novel stress me out in any sort of negative ways this year, only positive. And if you're doing NNWM as well, don't let it stress you out either. Use the pressure as motivation but don't look at 50k as the goal. Do what you can.

That being said, I like how my ideas keep changing for where this story is going. Last year, I had a pretty firm outline of where I wanted my story to go because I had been mentally planning it through the second half of October and I knew the beginning and ending, just not how the characters quite GOT to the ending.

This time around, I'm introducing the characters and letting their personalities interact with each other like they would IRL and not IRBook. It's like they actually have freewill and motivation and thoughts and it's rather scary not knowing what's going to happen. All I know is that it's good fuel for writing, writing, writing.

I'm sure something will happen in my novel. Eventually. Right?

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If you're doing NaNoWriMo, check out some of these books for helpful tips!











Tuesday, November 2, 2010

NaNoWhatNow?

So this year, like last, I am participating in NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. The goal of which is to hash out a 50,000 word "novel" in the month of November.

Easier said than done.

Well, actually, scratch that. It doesn't sound easy at all.

That being said, it's not as daunting as it sounds either.

It's a feat that's totally do-able. I am blogging proof that it can be done. I believe I hit 50,133 words when I submitted my work twenty-three minutes before midnight of the last day of November last year. What was funny, well, at the time, scary, was that when I went to submit it, it said there was a time discrepancy and that I wasn't able to submit it or "win" NaNoWriMo because it was December 1st.

Needless to say, I about freaked out in fear.

But it was fixed in time. It seems about half of the people in my part of the country had an issue with submitting it on the last day and all we had to do was change our time zones on our profiles to Cuba's time zone and for some reason it worked.

IDKMYBFFJILL

Ya know, it's odd. I just hashed out 1,500 some words just now for my new NaNoNovel and now I'm typing a blog post, something I haven't done much of these past few months. This is time that I could have spent working on my NaNoNovel, words that could have been counted towards my goal, but instead I'm typing a blog post that doesn't have a time limit, word count, or an immediate reason for being here.

And that's the humor of the situation.

We talk about how scary a goal of 50,000 words in one month is, yet I just typed up about 1,500 in less than two and a half hours and I'm typing a blog post, watched some Doctor Who, and worked an entire shift at the store earlier.

I can make time for this.

But let me tell you, this me being ahead of the curve on the word count thing will NOT last, ha.

Be my NaNo buddy!
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If you're doing NaNoWriMo, check out some of these books for helpful tips!