I am a Winner! #NaNoWriMo

And there it was. After 30 days of hard work (on and off) I finished my first draft for a novel, ever. At 50573 words. I got met by applause and this message:

Author, on November 1 you accepted our challenge to write a novel in 30 days. Harnessed with a hard deadline, you persevered in the face of countless obstacles. You wrote with determination, you quieted that inner critic, and now you’ve reached the hallowed Winner’s Circle.

We couldn’t be more proud of your amazing accomplishment! Thank you for joining us on this outrageously creative adventure—we’ll see you next November for more. And we hope you’ll join us in April for Script Frenzy, too.

Before you go celebrate, we have some very special NaNoWriMo Winner Goodies for you. There are two paths to collecting them. We hope that NaNoWriMo meant enough to you that you will take a moment now and make a tax-deductible donation to help ensure that NaNoWriMo and the Young Writers Program are fully enabled for 2011! (If you’ve already donated, thank you so much for your contribution!)

When one defeat great challenges one always thank people, doesn’t one? Here goes.
First of all I have to thank the wonderful OlofB for his work on Devul that has helped me a whole deal while writing.
(if you have Flattr you can Flattr the application. Not, read this)
I also want to thank the Gothenburg cluster of Wrimos. Who I met up with for one coffee. Even though I did not get much writing done there it was still incredibly motivating!
Anyone that has cheered me on, be it random people on twitter, Wrimos and non Wrimos. People I know on Facebook. Or just people I know in real life, or wherever. Thank you!

I’ve learnt a lot about myself as a writer. But I think I’ll save that for another post I think. I know I can write a lot under pressure, if I put my mind into it. Which is something I can use.
I will definitely take part next year. If I got time.

Hope you all enjoyed this as much as I did!

Annons

#NaNoWriMo blog post with #Devul

Now I’m going to try out Devul for writing a blog post. I will try and get is as correct as possible with my spelling and what not. But we’ll see where it leads me. HI want to tell my story about what a difference it has made ofr me while blogging, No i mean while doing the NaNoWriMo challange. Currently I’m behind on my writing, because I have been sick and there’s alot of other things going on in my Life, it happesn we all know it. And we can’t always get what we wont. So the things -s the THing is that I need to catch up. And I calculated that I ned 33333 by the 20th of November to catch up. Not wanting to spend ”too much” time writing each day I decided that 2, correction 3 days would be the sufficient amount to catch up in decent speed. I was about 10k, bedhind. Which is roughly 3k per day, a bit more, but let’s not get down to specifics. I realised I had 1 hour left untill a new day would start and that I jhad just set myself up to write 3k words, within that hour. Oh well Since I cam nheep up a word count of k4k / hour, I thought uit would be a nice challange. I donät put much effort into spelling correclty, I aim to get the thoughts out of my head and just wite. I do some ciorrection notes while writing, if I efeel it nessessary. So I sat down and wrote, for one hour. 61 minutes to be aexact. And I wrote a whole of 3210 words in that time. At a pace of 3154 words per hour. I will put the screen shot somewhere in this post when I’ve finished writing it. Writing for a whiole hour straight will let your characters get through alot of things you might hnot have had in your mind alreayd, since most wthings I write isnät set in my head nuntil a bit into it. I get alot of ideas as I go and carry on with it. I ended upwriting myself into a trap. Which decveloped nicely, but we will see where it ends. My Male Main Character, I have 3, ended up ona business date, with one of the Female main characters boyfriend. I gues my characters decided that theyr lifes would start to get involved with eachothers by now. I reached 25k, which is haflf way, and sort of the reason why I’m writing this post. Are you halfway I asked myself, and after finishing the one hour session, I actually think I mgith jsut be half way story wise.

I’ve noticed alot when writing, that I don’ät really have to think. What is going to happen just happends. And I love that. It’s surprising and I have never written in this way before ever in my life. I don’t get distracted, since I use Devil, and I can just carry on. I can decide to edit the session I’ve worked on when I’m done with it, or save it for a day when I want to go back and have minor inspiration. Because let it be said that editing your misspellings is a good idea, atleast if you’ve used Devil/Devul, I keep writing that wrong, ;). Oh and my random music list on Spotify managed to give me good dancing/club music just as my characters went into a club. Aint that just leovely?
There are quite a few blog posts related to NaNoWriMo that I would want to write about but I think I will just pinch them in, with what I have already written and we will see if it fits.
Hope you enjoyed this Devul/NanowriMo post of mine, and that you will try it out.

Do not Forget to check out Flattr as well!

Session: During 9 minutes, 647 words were added at a pace of 4000 words per hour.

#Devul for #NaNoWriMo

I went to FSCONS this weekend, whereupon I talked to a friend of mine about NaNoWriMo, since I had figured out that he was participating as well. We started talking about how it’s not supposed to be editable, and how awesome it would be if we could just have a nifty little program that let you see the word count when you write, but you wouldn’t be able to stop and edit what you were writing. And through that you would just keep the flow going.
At first glance the idea might seem really similar to Write or Die, which I guess it is. But the difference here is that you set the limit, and you push yourself only, and you will never have to pay for it, unless you want to (v0.01, v0.02,v0.03 and v0.04, read about why Flattr and NaNoWriMo)

That same evening he poked me when I got home, he had left the conference earlier than me, and said I got the program, try it out! I was exhausted from an awesome day (that I will write more about later) but said I would try it the morning after and so I did.
I immediately fell in love with it. I knew I would be able to use it to get my writing done, and I wouldn’t be able to look back! Yesterday I caught up writing 4k words!

He decided to name it Devul, The name “devul” is a combination of “/dev/null” and “devil”.

One of the reasons for why I felt this would be a good tool to use is the tip, that all of us keep getting over and over while writing our NaNo, Don’t look back!

Whatever you do, don’t read over what you’ve written until you are finished. That is an easy way to get distracted. Remember, you’ll have to edit the thing many times before your piece of art is perfected. Just write forward, don’t make corrections, don’t read over it, just push forward and write.

One thing that is quite important to remember though, is that in order to use this particular tool you basically have to be decently sure you can write without seeing anything of what you write, since it only offers you a box with the words you’ve written and the words per hour count.
Words per hour gives you a rough idea how much longer you’d have to write to catch up.

You will be wanting to edit it when you’re done with your session, or have catched up with the word count for the day, though. At least I’d say so from my personal experience, since you will do a lot of misspelling and might even totally screw up things and not have an idea of what you were trying to write unless you go back to it when you have a fairly rough idea of what you wrote and it is still fresh in your head. You can expect mistakes like ”klkiillikely”, which was supposed to be ”likely”.

The application now writes out how long you’ve been writing (started minute), how many words and at what pace, when you exit it.
Here are some examples of mine.

During 19 minutes, 1278 words were added at a pace of 3894 words per hour.
During 13 minutes, 633 words were added at a pace of 2900 words per hour.
During 20 minutes, 955 words were added at a pace of 2846 words per hour.
During 14 minutes, 948 words were added at a pace of 3896 words per hour.
During 14 minutes, 790 words were added at a pace of 3207 words per hour.

(please don’t be alarmed by the words per minute, or feel any pressure though, some people think I’m extreme in my writing without looking at my screen…)
It’s important to note that the program saves your text Every word you write/Everytime you press spacebar. So you don’t have to worry about loosing more than a word.
To take this project further we, well Olof mainly, need your input on what you want. It currently works best/easiest in Linux, or if you have python ready to set play on your OS of choice. If you don’t know what Python is, well… Let’s not go there.
You can comment either here, or on his post about the latest version, for added functionality. Current aims are to get it working for other OS’ and have it work without the command prompt. [Edit: OSX support]

I’m looking forward to how this develops, but right now we need you Linux users out there who want to help us develop it!

NaNoWriMo + Flattr = <3

It’s November, and all of us NaNoWriMo fans know exactly what that means. It’s time to chase that word count again. The aim is to write 50000 words in 30 days.
Myself forgot, even though I very well knew it was the first of November, to start writing the first day. I didn’t get going untill late that night, and it had already become a new day. I’ve still got some catching up to do, on 3k today, with todays goal to reach 6667, to stay on track. Added note: 9th Nov I caught up with 4k new words thanks to Devul

When I was writing last night I started to think about Flattr and that I really should inform more of them WriMos out there about this wonderful thing.
Flattr is a Social Micro Donation System, with Flat-rate. You can pay as little as €2 a month, and as much as €100 if you want to. This is shared between the items you decide to click during the month. You click around on things you like and maybe encourage others to use it as well.
I wish you guys to have a look at Flattr, and see if it’s something that you’d want to fit into your blog, or connect to your creative writings, or other kinds of creations.

Why do we write? Your aim might not be to earn money. But what if other people wish to give you a little something for your effort?

I’ve written quite a lot about Flattr before, and I have a strong love for it. WikiLeaks are even using it!
There are also some other NaNoWriMo writers I know of who use this service already, and people who publish their books[swe] online too. In my efforts to draw attention to Flattr I e-mailed a few people, which decent results.

I hope you’ll have a look and love Flattr as much as I do!

Flash Fiction Friday: #1

Flash Fiction Friday, so I will be conducting a bit of fictional writing here on my blog, hopefully every friday. Partly to cut off from all the ordinary stuff, and partly to open up my creative thinking a little more. Here goes:

He looked around, waking up with yet again one them hazy feelings.
”Where am I?” he thought slowly, soon to realize that this time he was actually home in his own bed. It had been another crazy night lastnight, he guessed, since he didn’t remember anything. He had started to wonder why he kept getting these horrible blackouts with no recollection at all of where he’d been for more than a few days. Life used to be good, and he used to know who he was, where he’d been, who he’d met. Heck, if he’d even met anyone or just stayed at home.
”Good thing I work from home, with only deadlines to keep” He hadn’t missed any of them, yet, and no important meetings with any of his clients, so far so good.
He was strong headed and way too proud to go to the doctor. Even though he didn’t have anyone else insisting he should go, he had a nagging feeling that something might be worse than he could imagine.

He got out of bed and into the bathroom. He, as he always does in the morning, picked up his brush and brushed his long hair, getting out every last knot of it. Long well kept hair.
He looked himself in the mirror in the bathroom, looked closely at himself. Watching himself he could see that he’d been ageing, realizing he had not experienced even half of his life lately.
– ”What the fuck is wrong with you!” he screamed as he smashed his left fist into the mirror. Stunned he looked at the mirror, then looked at his knuckles, now bleeding. The rage had gone away, as soon as his fist had broken the mirror. It had nothing to do with having broken the mirror, nothing to do with having broken his skin on his knuckles and nothing to do with the blood now slowly finding its way out if the cuts.
It was the shock, that did it, the shock of having gotten violent. Gotten so enraged that he broke something. He had always been such a calm boy, never hurting himself or anyone else.

Looking at his knuckles, he didn’t feel the need to clean the cuts. He kept watching the blood drip from his hand down into the sink. The red color against the white, slowly running down the drain.
– ”You will be my war wounds, I will carry you as a memory of what I’m not.” he said out loud, like he was proclaiming it to the world, so that they would know.

Publicera din bok online

Det brukar frågas hur kulturarbetarna ska få betalt och i Almedalen mötte Piratpartiet upp med Kulturskaparna. Det är svårt att förklara möjligheterna konkret. Samtidgit som jag anser att det är viktigt att man tar eget ansvar för sin inkomst, och därför undersöker vilka möjligheter man har, istället för att bara titta på problemen. Men jag ska visa på lite exempel på hur man kan hantera sitt författarskap väl.

Anna Troberg är nog ett av de bästa exempel jag har sett på att vända om i upphovsrättsfrågan. Hon öppnade sig för att lyssna på vad det hela, som piratrörelsen kämpade så hårt för, handlade om. Många har hört historien, andra inte.

Nu lägger hon upp sin bok Chefer Från Helvetet som sommarföljetong på sin blogg. Alla delarna har även Flattr-knappar (tips, börja på sista sidan), vilket långsiktigt kan ge henne några extra kronor för boken hon aldrig hade sett skymten av annars.
Nyligen läste jag ut boken i dess papperskopia, som Anna förövrigt gav till mig. Eftersom att jag absolut älskade boken, bestämde jag mig för att sjänka lite klick på alla kapitlen som hittills blivit publicerade på hennes blogg i sommarföljetongen.

Att anpassa sig är positivt, ibland. I detta fall är det en utveckling i rätt riktning. Utnyttja de sätt som finns för att publicera sin bok. Tillägget med Flattr, ger ju bara en liten extra kick, och ännu ett sätt att anpassa sig och utnyttja de nya teknikerna positivt.

Jan Lindgren publicerar hela sin NaNo2009, kapitel för kapitel. NaNo är en förkortning för NaNoWriMo, som i sin tur står för National Novel Writing Month. Även dessa med Flattr-knappar. Vi har även exemplet från Ravenna, Anna Svensson, som publicerat sin roman Mörkrets Väktare online, även den går att flattra.

Nu har jag ju bara gett exempel på svenska författare som använt sig utav detta. Men det finns även andra exempel. Toreas är en fantasy roman som publiceras kapitel för kapitel på en wiki, där man fritt får använda, kopiera och dela med sig av texten, bara man släpper det under public domain.

Jag har tidigare skrivit om alternativa sätt, innan Flattr fanns som alternativ, då Unni Drougge nyligen hade lanserat sin ljudbok online via The Pirate Bay, där den fortfarande finns att ladda ner.

Om vi fortsätter på detta spår kommer vi förhoppningsvis nå en personligare och smickrande framtid

Social remix ett sätt att leva

Social remix av remix är hur det har utvecklats. Vi ser, inspirerars och remixar. Remixen remixar och vi remixar socialt. Social remix.

Att inspireras och nyttja det man blivit inspirerad av för att göra något nytt, eller någorlunda nytt är inte ovanligt. Men ibland kan det ju självklart bli lite fel. Dagens media rapporterar om hur Esterella klantat sig med deras senaste reklamkampanj ”Väck djuret i dig”. De har helt enkelt inspirerats och remixat konst av fotografen Geoffrey Cottenceaus. Man kan hävda att det var alldeles för likt, och det kanske det är. Kanske skulle de ha gjort cred på något vis till fotografen. Men det de främst borde ha gjort, var att kolla med honom om det var okej att använda honom som inspiration och så tydliga, men remixade, kopior av hans verk.

Remixkulturen är ett faktum, den kommer inte försvinna.

Ett inlägg per dag

2022 fortsätter att publicera ett inlägg per dag. På grund av seglingen så har jag inte riktigt haft tid att läsa varje dag de senaste dagarna, och läser således ikapp just nu.

Qeruiem om Remixkultur var ett väldigt långt inlägg med en del illustrerande videoklipp till. Tyvärr hade Flash däckat, och min uppkoppling just nu skulle inte må så bra av flertalet youtube-klipp.

Isak Gerson om Kunskapskärlek och Patent, var enormt gripande och det ger mig inspiration. Inspiration till ännu en vision, med något som jag tycker är viktigt. Vad får ni se vid ett senare tillfälle.

Igår Olof Bjarnason om Gestikulerande människor ger oss en vacker blick in i en framtid som nästan är här. Den är inom räckhåll.

Idag Göran Widham om att En gång i tiden såldes alla idéer som om de vore varor ger en intressant bild in i framtiden. Reklam i all ära. Det ska bli spännande att se hur detta leder vidare.

I morgon är det mitt inlägg på tur!

Vi syns i Almedalen

Jag har sagt förut hur viktigt det är att vi syns, här i Almedalen provar vi en ny plattform. Nämligen Youtube. OlofB har varit jätteduktig på att arrangera små intervjuer med våra olika Riksdagskandidater. Bland annat har Andreas och Ola kommenterat 6% i Sifo, Olof pratade med Johnny om ett seminarie som inte var PP-politik, och Amelia blir tillfrågad om Bryssel, medan Anna och Gun pratar om distraktion. Igår intervjuade han även mig om Flattr. Det är en bra satsning på rörlig bild, och det behövs. Här är vi! Här får ni ett ansikte på oss Piratpartister här i Almedalen

Musikvideo, Vote4Pirate

Mad Cranium – Vote4Pirate är Piratpartiets låt för kampanjen i år. Den är lite catchig och allmänt skön. Inte helt i min musiksmak men jag tycker definitivt om den. Nu har grabbarna äntligen blivit klara med den officiella musikvideon till den.

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