M E M O R Y L E S S N E S S

- background – features – screenshots – license – download -

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This is the sixth year that I’ve participated in NaNoWriMo, and (at least) the third year that I have used a spreadsheet to track my word count. Given that, as any WriMo knows, half (or more) of NaNoWriMo is spent avoiding actually writing one’s novel, I’ve spent far too long on this. The version from 2007 is lost, I’m afraid, but the sheet I created in 2008 has survived (and been tweaked incessantly so far this year). And that, dear reader/writer, is what I’m bringing to you. Behold!

Why am I “releasing” this? After all, there are over 300,000 hits when one googles “nanowrimo word count.” Not all of these are trackers, but you get the idea. There are web-based trackers and there are other Excel-based trackers.

Why, you ask? I figured that someone somewhere might find a use for it. Maybe I should have googled this before I built my own, though…but I still like it. Besides, it has given me a way to procrastinate during the past two Novembers.

Using it should be pretty intuitive, I think, but comment if you need help. It makes several assumptions (ie., dates are for November, total word count goal is 50,000, etc.), though these should be easy to change if you’re familiar with Excel. Perhaps there will be another version later that allows these to be variable. We shall see!

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• Daily and total word count
• Best day
• Average day (including zeroes)
• Average writing day (excluding zeroes)
• Pace
• Projected completion date (updated daily)
• Oodles of other statistics, many of which are redundant
• Charts!

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Check out these screenshots! See how far behind I am!

The Tracker Itself

Summary Statistics

Total Chart, showing wordcount relative to goal for the month

Daily Chart, showing wordcount relative to goal on a daily basis

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NaNoWriMo Tracker v.02 by Scumdog Steev is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

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[ Excel 2003 version ] | [ Excel 2007 version ]

We’re doing NaNoWriMo again this year. Here’s my info, if you’re interested.

The goal is to watch one horror film per day this month.

I plan to update this post and fill in the following list (including, possibly, extremely brief reviews) as the month goes by.

October 2009 Horror Films

1. Nightmare Man (Paradigm Pictures 2006) – decent; bonus = appearance by Richard Moll (Bull from Night Court)
2. Wicked Little Things (Millennium Films 2006) – ravenous little kids are creepy; Lori Heuring, who plays the mother, was in the episode of Walker Texas Ranger featuring Baboon that we saw on 9/29…weird
3. Pandorum (Constantin Film Produktion 2009) – sci-fi/horror (the IMDB lists its first genre as horror, though I might reverse the order); good overall, though not as scary as Paul W.S. Anderson’s Event Horizon (P.W.S.A. produced Pandorum and directed Event Horizon)
4. Scream (Dimension Films 1996) – still a good’un
5. In the Mouth of Madness (New Line Cinema 1994) – the Anti-Christ (Sam Neill – I’ve called him that since I saw Omen III: The Final Conflict) is good in this and it’s still disturbing, even after multiple viewings; Lovecraftian horror is more unsettling than slasher horror
6. Perkins’ 14 (After Dark Films 2009) – more ravenous children (teens this time, I guess); disturbing
7. Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (Glen Echo Entertainment 2006) – really lame; The Blair Witch Project really should have been the end of “documentary”-as-horror (which has been going since at least 1980’s Cannibal Holocaust
8. Prom Night (Alliance Films 2008) – pretty good, basically a standard slasher film; I’ve never seen the original, but I probably should
9. Cthulhu (Arkham Northwest Productions 2007) – huh?
10. Carrie (Redbank Films 1976) – they’re all gonna laugh at you!
11. Paranormal Activity (Blumhouse Productions 2007/released 2009) – creepy and at least a different take on the “documentary”-as-horror thing (note from 10/7 still holds, though)
12. Night of the Living Dead (Image Ten 1968) – good film and, interestingly, in the public domain; the zombies are referred to as “ghouls” in this film
13. John Carpenter’s Vampires (Film Office 1998) – I’ve always liked this one, particularly the scene near the beginning where Valek kills most of the vampire-slaying team without saying anything; John Steakley’s novel (Vampire$ – on which this is based) is a lot different, but worth a read
14. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (American Zoetrope 1992) – a good adaptation of the book (with the exception of the added Dracula/Mina love story); features a bad British accent by Keanu as well
15. Clive Barker’s Book of Blood (Matador Pictures 2008) – a pretty good adaptation of two of Clive’s short stories (immensely better than Midnight Meat Train which, despite being based on a great story, was pretty ungood, imo). Bonus = cameo by Doug “Pinhead” Bradley. Apparently, we’re all about movies with people’s names above the title (see the last three days).
16. Friday the 13th (Platinum Dunes/New Line Cinema/Paramount Pictures 2009) – immensely better than the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake that Platinum Dunes did a few years ago; it’s basically like another (better) sequel to the original than a real remake…this give me hope for the Nightmare on Elm Street remake that comes out next year — we finished this on 10/17 due to needing sleep before the half-marathon on the morning of 10/17
17. The Rage: Carrie 2 (Red Bank Films 1999) – we enjoy this one, though it doesn’t get much love on the IMDB (Just 4.3 stars? When our selection from 10/7 has 7? No way.)
18. Freddy vs. Jason (New Line Cinema 2003) – one of the best movies of the last 10 years; we finished this on 10/19
19. Trick ‘r Treat (Bad Hat Harry Productions 2008) – kind of disjointed (which I guess is the point), but decent overall; not to be confused with Trick or Treat
20. Seventh Moon (Haxan Films 2008) – by one of the co-directors of The Blair Witch Project; interesting and different, based on Chinese mythology, worth seeing
21. Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles (Geffen Pictures 1994) – a decent adaptation of the novel (which makes sense, as Anne Rice wrote the screenplay. I suppose if it’s good enough for Anne Rice…); oddly, the actor who looks the most like the character he’s playing is supposed to look according to the books is Tom Cruise
22. Låt den rätte komma in (Let the Right One In) (EFTI 2008) – interesting Swedish vampire film
23. Queen of the Damned (Warner Bros. Pictures 2002) – enjoyable even though it’s basically a mashup of the second two Vampire Chronicles novels; it’s not a great adaptation, but I think it would be hard to follow if you haven’t read the books
24. Borderland (Tonic Films 2007) – disturbing and gross; loosely based on true events
25. Candyman (PolyGram Filmed Entertainment) – based on “The Forbidden,” which is the first Clive Barker story I ever read; I don’t think this is a very faithful adaptation (it’s been ~16 years since I read that story), but it’s a good film
26. The Sentinel (Universal 1977) – weird and didn’t really play out like I expected it to; starring Chris Sarandon who, when I saw him in the bathroom at Texas Fear Fest, didn’t wash his hands
27. Tamara (Integrated Films and Management 2005) – pretty good and unformulaic
28. Red Victoria (Cashel Entertainment 2008) – not great, but with some mildly amusing parts
29. The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation 1975) – I still don’t get it
30. Return of the Living Dead III (Bandai Visual Company 1993) – an interesting take on zombies and whether or not they can retain cognition — we finished this one on 10/31
31. Halloween (Compass International Pictures 1978) – one of my favorite movies; the timing is great

We made it, aww yeah. Thanks to my pal Rob, from whom we stole this idea. Next year, we’re thinking of doing themed weeks (vampires, zombies, etc.).

Today, I ran on a relay team in the Take a Hike Ike Sprint Triathlon at Deussen Park on Lake Houston. It was a lot of fun, despite being cold and windy.

The team was Linda (a coworker of mine) – 500m swimming, Viroj (our boss) – 10.8 miles cycling, and me – 3 miles running. However, due to today’s weather, they cut the swimming portion (something about whitecaps in the lake), so the race was run 3 miles/bike 10.8 miles/run 3 miles. Linda hadn’t brought her running shoes, so I did both of the running legs of the race. I’m not sure what my times were, but I know that they were decent considering the cold wind blowing in my face and the fact that I couldn’t feel my toes for the first half of the first three mile run. I’d like to someday do a triathlon myself, and so would Liz.

Here’s a video Liz took of me crossing the finish line:

We got second place in the Co-Ed Relay division.

Here are the pictures that Liz took before, during, and after the race.

I’ll add more pictures when I get them from Viroj. I’ll also update with our completion time when I see the official results.

Liz and I have some more races planned; stay tuned.

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. (I’d like to see the source for “the BBC believes” – it seems that this list would be better-formulated if it were created by the BBC, as it is a very strange set of books, including classics and pop literature stuff – but this is still interesting).

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read.
2) Tally your total at the bottom.
3) Tag others and pass it on.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible (parts)
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell (x)
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens (x)
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller (x)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien (x)
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger (x)
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald (x)
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams (x)
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky (x)
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck (x)
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll (x)
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis (5 of the 7)
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis (x – this is book 1 of #33)
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne (x – there’s technically no book with this title, though there are two Milne books about Pooh)
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell (x)
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown (x)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert (x)
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley (x)
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez (x – this book is AMAZINGLY AWFUL)
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville (x)
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker (x)
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White (x)
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad (x)
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery (x)
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks (x)
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare (x)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl (x)
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Tally (as stated) = 25
Tally (actual) = 30.5 (including 5 for _The Chronicles of Narnia_, 50% for the Bible, and 2 for the two Winnie the Pooh books – note that I’m not counting the Pooh-related poetry volumes; I’m not sure what % of Shakespeare’s works I’ve read, but it’s odd that _Hamlet_ is listed in addition to them…I’d guess I’ve read about 30% of his works, but I’m not including that here).

(reposted from Facebook)