Mixed success.

Just over 13,000 words. A far cry from 50,000 but it was fun trying.

Again, real life got in the way, even during the week I took off for it.  Nevermind.   It was the best fun I’ve had writing in ages.

One thing I took from this year’s attempt was that I really need to dedicate “proper” time to my writing and by “proper” time I mean dedicating working time, that is treating it like a second job, to my writing. Especially if I want to ever think about doing it for a living.

The problem with that is, with two part time jobs and all the stuff I’ve dedicated time to in the evenings, I don’t really have the working time to spare.

Oh, hold on… I’ve just quit the job with the after-school care. Looks like I might have the time after all…

(And I’m not talking about me here…  Well, only a wee bit.)

So, did the Festive Fat Man bring you anything nice this year?  Coupled with braving the sales it has been a very booky Christmas.

Children Of The Mind by Orson Scott Card, Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson, The Child Garden by Geoff Ryman, Pavane by Keith Roberts and Gateway by Frederik Pohl.

Should keep me busy for a while…

mrBen was here this evening and we were discussing the whole podcasting/audiobook thing.

Actually, that’s not strictly true.  We already had that conversation and had moved on to fixing up some microphones and seeing what it actually sounded like.  We recorded my telling of a story and although I’m more used to it now, I thought I sounded like a wet fart escaping from a bag.

Apparently everyone feels the same way once you hear your own voice played back to you.  Or maybe my voice actually sounds like a wet fart escaping from a bag…

So, we used Audacity for the recording.  Had to use the Windows version as there was a known bug with the software and my Audigy sound card in Linux.  Shame.

But it wasn’t an altogether terrible experience.  Still have the mic and the mixing desk here, much to Ruthy’s dismay, and I’ll play with it some more to get a bit more comfortable with it.

Ages ago I had installed yWriter on a previous Windows XP session and used it intermittently.  Since my last reinstall of XP I never got around to installing it again.

In the last week I had it in my mind to give the software another go, but not on Windoze as I’m weaning myself off it as much as possible for life under Ubuntu.

So, while checking out the yWriter site I learned that while the software had advanced by two versions some guy had successfully had got it working under Wine, the Linux Windows-esque environment.

Thinking that this is a good thing I download Windows installer and the software to allow it to run on a pen drive, follow the instructions, install both in Wine and everything runs just fine.

Now, my recollection is that yWriter isn’t the best software in the world but it’s free and it fits all my requirements quite nicely.  I’m interested to see what version 4 brings.