Keep Going

People do things to see if they can do it. Like marathoners, who run 26 and a bit of miles. Or bicyclists who ride 100 miles, a century. That seems like a lot to some people. To others it is a nice warm-up for their 400, 600, or 1200 kilometers There is an event where they run four miles (or something like that. it is not a tough distance the first time) at the top of the hour. And then another run of the same course. And it continues with a new start at the top of the hour until there is only one finisher. There is no stopping for eating or sleeping. You get to do that if you finisher your four (or whatever it is) miles and have time left in the hour. This is not restricted to physical things (Oh, wait, I forgot to mention the Ironman triathlete, my apology to any of you who have done one of them) anyway, it is not a physical event. I once joined a 365 Photo event. A photo every day for a year. How did I miss taking a photo on a day? I did in the midst of it all. But, like many, I did stay with it until my 365 photos were taken. You may recall my 1,000 consecutive days of Duolingo language learning. (I am still at that one) and there are lots of 30, or 31, or 28-day challenges based on months. Like Inktober right now. 30 days of cycling in April or September or both. I am not aware of the challenge of typewriting in days or words or pages. Are you?

Last weekend the subject of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) came up. Could you do that on a typewriter? How many words would you get credit for per page? It turns out that they do permit it, typing your novel. I am digging into getting the details of how it is counted and how much credit you get per page. If you would rather, of course, you can convert it to text and submit that. Though it seems like a pain. This is something like my nephew who is participating in NaNoWriMo by handwriting his novel. Writing out 1,667 words a day — transferring that to another format. Ow.

I di also look up how they validate the word count. There are hundreds of thousands of people participating. They have some metrics for determining the count. It is not like typing for speed where every five characters counts. It was supposed that they use something like the Unix utility “wc” to do their counting. That software breaks words by whitespace. Which means A J Person counts for three words, and Li Wu counts for two. While Suzanne Goodperson-HappyMarriage also counts for two words. Care with name selection sounds like it will be important.

Advice for beginners includes what to do if this seems like too much for you. Recommendations included writing a story a week, 25,000 words for the month (a half-NaNoWriMo), or just going for it and finding out how much you can write. Which sounds good to me. Just do not quit.

— MichaelRpdx :: h3k

Leave a Comment