…this is for all you who are doing the same thing…

I logged onto the National Novel Writing Month Web site to update my word count. I thought the connection was going to time out before my user page would load. Obviously, the NaNoWriMo site is seeing a lot of traffic presumably people are madly updating their user profiles or something.

As far as my own writing project (I can’t really call it a novel), it is continuing along nicely in its non-linear way. Current word count stands at 5,245 — which means that I’m a tenth of the way towards my goal, and it’s only the first day of the month. I’ll attribute some of that to my own (non-pathological) hypergraphia. But I attribute more of my progress to using WordPress blogging software as a kind of simple CMS. The chronological ordering of the blogging software allows me to arrange and rearrange chunks of writing, as I figure out the chronology of the writing project. I’m also assigning categories to different chunks of writing based on various topics, and assigning authors based on the principal personality in each chunk of writing.

I’m making this sound hopelessly complex, but it’s really not. It’s as if I’m writing on big index cards which I then file according to chronology; and it’s as if I’m using different color index cards for different topics; and somehow the index cards can also be sorted out according to principal personality (and a few other categories). Or to put it another way, instead of developing an elaborate filing system with character files, scene files, etc., I’m just using blogging software to automate all that. The end result is that it’s easy to make big changes really fast in response to the developing writing — how freeing!