NaNo Update
Here it is day four of NaNoWriMo, and my word count stands at 5,320. That’s an estimate, told to me by the NaNo Statistical Spreadsheet for Typists that I worked up. Those of us who type generally make a best guess at our actual wordcount. There are various ways of going about it, but I go by the rule of thumb that five characters = one word. My margins are set at 65 characters. I knock that down to 60, figuring that I rarely type all the way to the margin stop, and that gives me 12 words per line. I’m one of those daft people who types single-spaced. (Most of my editing is done on the fly as I retype the text into the computer.) A full single-spaced page yields 60 lines. At 12 words per line, that comes out to 720 words per page. I round down to 700 to account for paragraph breaks and new paragraph indentations.
The tricky bit is keeping track of one’s progress and knowing at a glance whether or not one is on track for a Nov 30 completion. Okay, it’s tricky for me; I stink at math. So I took apart Erik Benson’s popular NaNoWriMo Report Card spreadsheet and adapted it for typists. You enter your average number of words per page at the top, and it tells you how many pages you should be up to for every day of the month. Each day, you enter your accumulated page count and the rest of the spreadsheet will autopopulate the estimated number of words you’ve typed that day, your total word count altogether, how many words you have left, your average words typed per day, how many words you need to type tomorrow to stay on track for 50k by Nov 30, the date you’ll finish at your present typing rate, and your percentage completed toward 50k. Right now, I’m on track to finish on Nov 28.
In other news, I had to give up on my goal of typing the entire thing on the Triumph Norm. I really wanted to do it, because I’m writing about the same people who built it. I also felt that using it to write about how the workers deceived the Nazis would redeem it from its past as property of the Third Reich government. But alas, after five full pages I just cannot find my rhythm or catch a pace on it. It’s not the transposed Y and Z, because I’ve typed on enough other QWERTZ keyboards to be used to it. There’s just something about it that isn’t synching up with me. So last night I reluctantly switched over to the Olympia SM9. I could have gone with one of my other German machines–particularly the Studio 42, which may see action yet–but since I was switching away from the Triumph altogether I thought I might as well go for speed and solidity. The SM9 is pica pitch, which is why I chose it over the SG1. Man, is it nice! I’m typing at twice the pace I was on the Triumph.
For lunch-hour typing at work, I’ve brought in the Tower Chieftain II (a rebadged late Skyriter). In quick competition with the Hermes Rocket and Olympia Socialite, it was the lightest, quietest, most reliable, and easiest to type on.
From reading other posts on the official Typewriter Brigade board in the NaNoWriMo forums, it seems like a lot of people are switching typers right about day 3. A common theme is “I really wanted to type on _______, but…” Which brings up the question: if you could have any typewriter, what would you really want to use for NaNoWriMo?
I did make the switch. I started out on the PC and moved to my tried-and-true Lettera 32.
If I could use any typewriter in the world, though? Even though I’ve never used one, my fantasy typer is one of the old Royal 10’s with the glass sides, or maybe a late-model Underwood Touchmaster 5.
Comment by Mike.Speegle — November 4, 2009 @ 1:23 pm
I once again express my envy of those with little travel typewriters.
But really, if I could use any typewriter…at the moment, I think I’d still go with my SG-1. I’m that smitten with it. I *might* choose a different typeface for it if I could–the plain jane 11 pt. font is pretty middling all the way around–but it’s growing on me.
But all the SM-9 talk that seems to have popped up makes me think I’ll at least my ugly beat-up 11 pt. model out for a bit, if only to compare.
Comment by littleflowerpetals — November 4, 2009 @ 8:03 pm
Erm…can I buy a verb?
Always proofread carefully to make sure you didn’t any words out.
Comment by littleflowerpetals — November 4, 2009 @ 8:52 pm
I thought I’d always be a Royal guy and for aesthetics, I probably always will be, but this SM9 has not let me down…
Its like, she came right into my life just for NaNo…can’t fight fate, right?
Comment by deek — November 4, 2009 @ 10:19 pm
Always an Olympia Man!
I have to say, my SM9 is working beautifully. I am keeping my fingers crossed that the SG1 gets done soon. I am just dying to see what LFP is talking about.
Comment by James Watterson — November 5, 2009 @ 12:35 am
I have to admit to being intrigued by the Consul typewriters, since they have earned Will’s praise pretty consistently, and then I could fairly say “been there and typed on that.”
The sadist in me actually would like to see what it’s like to go to town on a Varityper, mainly because the photos I’ve seen make them look like something Captain Nemo might use for a manifesto.
What I’d really like, though, is a good standard machine that’s been professionally adjusted and tuned, with new rubber and clean type. Like LFP’s SG1, say. I like my machines, but the accumulated dust and occasional funky behavior demonstrates that in the area of repair and restoration, I’m still a dabbler.
Comment by mpclemens — November 6, 2009 @ 8:03 pm
Give me a Royal any day. I’m not sure I even care which one. The keys fly out from under my fingers – vital for any serious, throw-down writing like the NaNo.
Comment by monda — November 6, 2009 @ 9:48 pm
I dunno. A guy with your collection simply has no excuse for ever typing with something as common as a SM-9. It’s like a vintage car collector driving a Taurus.
Whatever happened to your typer with the Metallica typeface?
Comment by Strikethru — November 16, 2009 @ 1:51 am
The SM9 may be common, but it’s a darn good typer, and in NaNo, that’s what counts.
I’ve given a variety of machines a try since I wrote this update. I did use the Studio 42 for a few days, then gave the Super-Speed a go. The Super-Speed turned out to be ungodly loud–at least, it seems that way in the dead of night.
For the last few nights, my primary at-home typer has been the Remington Noiseless 10. It’s a monster. It looks (and weighs) an awful lot like a Teutonic tank. It makes the Noiseless Portable feel flimsy.
NaNo is a great excuse to bring some of my seldom-used machines out of their stables. But as Duffy warned about, primping a machine for use can be a real time-destroyer. I spent a couple of hours today fiddling with the Remington Seventeen my neighbor gave me. It still has a little bit of an issue with the drawband dragging toward the end of a line, but I’ve mostly got it tip-top. Man, those Seventeens are sweet.
Some machines that I would like to use I just don’t dare. Like one of the Caligraphs or the Smith-Premier 1 (if either were working). Doing NaNo on the fraktur Remington 7 would be way cool, but I honestly don’t think that it would hold up under that intense of usage. It’s a fragile machine (remember that many of its parts are made out of century-old wood). Besides, who’d want to read 100 pages of Germanic calligraphy?
Comment by olivander — November 16, 2009 @ 9:53 pm