The WDC NanoLounge

I wrote my finished novel longhand. The plus with longhand is you can find what you did when, immediately by flipping through the pages. Also while typing it, you can add or change stuff, which becomes almost like a second draft.

If I were to use MS Word, I would make separate files for each 10,000 (or so) words.MS word can ease things or make them too complicated, and the file, if in one chunk, takes too long to open.

The pluses with MS word are, it has the dictionary/synonyms and you won't have to type anything again. Also, should your computer freeze or do a trick on you, MS Word has the recovery system.

Still, you should be saving a copy on a flash drive or CD or anything external, heaven forbid, should the computer die on you. I think the whole thing with MS Word depends on how good your computer is and how Word works in it. In a faster computer, it may work just fine. My laptop is three years old and, despite the 100 G memory, it is quite full. So it has slowed down somewhat.

For NaNo, I am not going to use MS Word, although I have it in my computer. I plan to use Abiword, a free word processing program which has most of the elements of MS Word, including word count, but it doesn't have the recovery. On the other hand, it opens much faster, and it is less intrusive while I write. I just have to remember to save often.





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