NaNoWriMo 2005

I participated for the first time in 2004 and did complete 50,000+ words on a larger work, which was a real breakthrough at the time — the novel I worked on had been sitting around in various states of disrepair for over 10 years. So NaNoWriMo functioned as some extra bit of motivation for me, to put it mildly — a context that allowed me to get the work done.

September 2005 has arrived, and I realize that it won’t be that long until the next NaNoWriMo event. If I participate again in 2005, I’ll need to get a few things accomplished by October, like a basic outline of what I’ll be working on, and my writing tools figured out — what text editors I’ll want to try this time around. Since my druthers nowadays is for plaintext and CLI utilities, I’ll likely be considering those options rather than a full-blown word processor.

For me, I wound up keeping a journal in MacJournal simultaneous with the writing, so a journaling program is not out of the question for one or both parts, as long as I’m able to get nonproprietary plaintext out of it easily, would be an interesting way to go. Journler would be my current choice for that.

I’ve written up a brief overview of the programs I used last year for an O’Reilly weblogs post, which you can view at It was a dark and stormy night…