Coding a Novel

I have always loved writing, though I never seem to make time for it. I have participated in several NaNoWriMo events (National Novel Writing Month), where 50,000 words are written in one month. This page details my effort to move to a more sustainable pace and find/make the right tooling, where I’ll continue to share story updates and tooling, from bash scripts to Vim tips.

Graph is no longer active :-(

Updates

2022-02-20

A continuous graph isn’t a sustainable motivator for me, I’ve learned. I’ll revisit this again in the future, reworked into a sprint-oriented word tracker.

2021-03-19

A few more fixes, now a little closer to what I wanted. Each day has a fixed goal, the thicker line, at 800 words. Never more, never less. The smaller line is the current average - write no less than that, and the average won’t waver. If less is written, well, the next day that line will come down a little. I’m not sure if two goals will be useful or not. At least in theory, when the average is higher than 800, the day’s goal should be capped. But the numbers aren’t so good right now.

2021-03-11

The first two weeks were a motivator, but until I have a better rolling average target, I’ve adopted “reset dates”. I don’t always have time to maintain a perfect average, so recognizing specific start/stops will optimistically keep goals positive.

2021-03-08

The first two weeks have been filled with data, and what a success. Though the simple average target I hacked in originally just takes the first day in the range and adds 800 to each following day. Now that it’s rolling forward daily, that will throw the targets off daily in unpredictable ways. Worse, I do not like seeing all of the past days turn red when I rightfully earned those green bars.

I’ll temporarily dial it back to 4 weeks on the simple target, then move the daily target locally when I’m motivated. Probably in 3 weeks, 6 days.

Before the tweak:

Sad Lazy Compute

After the tweak (this is what the graph looked like yesterday):

Happy Lazy Compute

Ideally the target will move up and down based on the average, but only for today, not all those hard won past days.

2021-03-01

With my first missed day (hey, I was ahead!) I found the “missed day” filler to be a day behind. I notice a trend where when I’m ahead, I type a lot less. That’s not necessarily a bad thing - working ahead should yield rewards, after all.

2021-02-22

With two days in, writing is going strong and I love the graph. But the current average calculation is hilariously wrong. It’s because I changed to an ascending/moving graph, I need to compute the words written each day. I’ll get to that Tuesday or Wednesday and retcon this note. If it’s 2022 and this is still here, know that I had a good run.

2021-02-21: All Systems Go

The long-in-waiting site reboot is launched, the automated word count graph is live, a 90-day challenge is issued effective today to write every day and meet or exceed the above average, and… I have had to add the requirement that I must meet the day’s writing quota done before any more tool fiddling to support writing. But a few things I mean to add: