Inktober is a distant memory.

Now it’s time for NaNoWriMo! Almost. I don’t have any immediate interest in writing a novel, but I do have plenty of other stuff that needs writing — blog posts, my book, Runed Awakening, etc. So I’m going to try to write 100,000 words this month, spread across whatever.

Rules:

1. I’m only measuring, like, works. I’ll count this page, as short as it is, because it’s still a single self-contained thing that took some writing effort. But no tweets or IRC or the like.

2. I’m counting with vim’s g C-g or wc -w, whichever is more convenient. The former is easier for single files I edit in vim; the latter is easier for multiple files or stuff I edit outside of vim.

3. I’m making absolutely zero effort to distinguish between English text, code, comments, etc.; whatever the word count is, that’s what it is. So code snippets in the book will count, as will markup in blog posts. Runed Awakening is a weird case, but I’m choosing to count it because it’s inherently a text-based game, plus it’s written in a prosaic language. On the other hand, dialogue for Isaac HD does not count, because it’s a few bits of text in what is otherwise just a Lua codebase.

4. Only daily net change counts. This rule punishes me for editing, but that’s the entire point of NaNoWriMo’s focus on word count: to get something written rather than linger on a section forever and edit it to death. I tend to do far too much of the latter.

   This rule already bit me on day one, where I made some significant progress on Runed Awakening but ended up with a net word count of -762 because it involved some serious refactoring. Oops. Turns out word-counting code is an even worse measure of productivity than line-counting code.

These rules are specifically crafted to nudge me into working a lot more on my book and Runed Awakening, those two things I’d hoped to get a lot further on in the last three months. And unlike Inktober, blog posts contribute towards my preposterous goal rather than being at odds with it.

With one week down, so far I’m at +8077 words. I got off to a pretty slow (negative, in fact) start, and then spent a day out of action from an ear infection, so I’m a bit behind. Hoping I can still catch up as I get used to this whole “don’t rewrite the same paragraph over and over for hours” approach.

• art: Last couple ink drawings of Pokémon, hallelujah. I made a montage of them all, too.

  I drew Momo (the cat from Google’s Halloween doodle game) alongside Isaac and it came out spectacularly well.

  I finally posted the loophole commission.

  I posted a little “what type am I” meme on Twitter and drew some of the interesting responses. I intended to draw a couple more, but then I got knocked on my ass and my brain stopped working. I still might get back to them later.

• blog: I posted an extremely thorough teardown of JavaScript. That might be cheating, but it’s okay, because I love cheating.

  Wrote a whole lot about Java.

• doom: I did another speedmap. I haven’t released the last two yet; I want to do a couple more and release them as a set.

• blog: I wrote about game accessibility, which touched on those speedmaps.

• runed awakening: I realized I didn’t need all the complexity of (and fallout caused by) the dialogue extension I was using, so I ditched it in favor of something much simpler. I cleaned up some stuff, fixed some stuff, improved some stuff, and started on some stuff. You know.

• book: I’m working on the PICO-8 chapter, since I’ve actually finished the games it describes. I’m having to speedily reconstruct the story of how I wrote Under Construction, which is interesting. I hope it still comes out like a story and not a tutorial.

As for the three big things, well, they sort of went down the drain. I thought they might; I don’t tend to be very good at sticking with the same thing for a long and contiguous block of time. I’m still making steady progress on all of them, though, and I did some other interesting stuff in the last three months, so I’m satisfied regardless.

With November devoted almost exclusively to writing, I’m really hoping I can finally have a draft chapter of the book ready for Patreon by the end of the month. That $4 tier has kinda been languishing, sorry.