NaNoWriMo 2023 progress report
A mixed bag yesterday.
All positive, to be honest.
But not near as much positivity as needed.
I began the day trying to get my Mac laptop back on track. There is a yellow band on the screen and no internet connection, though the wireless seems fine. It needs upgrading from Monterey but with no ability to contact the upgrade server this seems like a lost cause.
I’ll have to take my Windows laptop to the write-in, and as a Mac guy for too many years now, this is painful.
Speaking of Windows, the only reason I bought the thing is so I can run the PC version of Office that includes Access, unavailable on any Mac version. I need a basic relational database with a bit of programming to keep track of my CYA mystery threads.
Once I discovered that the Google workspace suite of apps now includes a database linked with AppSheet, I had a bit of a play with that and it seems to be able to do the job.
This will give me a cloud and web-based solution I can access from my desktop Mac.
I may have to pay for a license eventually, something like ten US a month, but if I’m using it to make more money than that, I don’t mind.
Appsheet is based on simple data sources — originally spreadsheets — but now able to handle traditional relational databases, the sort of structures where (say) one author writes several books and instead of including the same author information for each book, you have different sheets for authors and books and just call in the author information.
Or turn it around and show all books written by one author. The big advantage is that instead of having the same information stored in multiple places, making updating details a huge chore and inevitably leading to corrupt and inconsistent data, information is stored in distinct places and links are used to assemble the information required depending on the need.
I used to be a fairly high level database programmer using Oracle and SQL Server and similar products in enterprise level systems and I have no desire to return to those days but for simple user-level apps, I’m quite happy to design and implement systems for my own use.
Anyway, this looks like a good fit for me. I can keep using my Mac, I already have a solid affection for the Google suite of workplace apps, and everything fits together nicely.
Yesterday I jumped on my bike, rode across the lake to the national library and hooked up with the writing group from the Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild for their weekly accountability brunch and write-in.
C Z Tacks, the new CSFG president, hosted the event and gave a presentation on trilogies and story arcs. A complex business requiring diagrams but once I grasped what she was getting at a lot of multi-book architectures became apparent. And it explains why so many people try to write a fantasy trilogy thinking they will be another Tolkien and their books fall flat.
We then went downstairs and quietly wrote. I had some plotting already completed for a key chapter element and I got most of that done, battling with the Windows interface all the way.
Rode home — a pleasant twenty-minute ride back over the lake, though with summer coming on, riding in the heat of the day is becoming less appealing — and found a solution for my Mac’s problems. I can’t fix the screen issue but I deleted my DNS proxies and could get back aboard the internet.
Appsheet looks increasingly like the way to go to solve my database problems.
NaNoWriMo looks like a lost cause now. Not unless I write three thousand words every remaining day of November. That’s not going to happen.
