Today's Countdown:

Today's countdown:

0 days, and just 23 hours before Ominous / Outline October!

31 days, 23 hours til Novella November!

the obvious.

Ominous / Outline October 2024 Day 1

Happy Ominous / Outline October!

For Ominous October, your challenge it to write at least 714 words (or more) per day, to write a 5k word short story each week! There's also an option to just write daily drabbles of 714 or more words as well.

This first week's prompt is "Undead / Strange Town"

Alternatively, today's Daily Prompt is "Raised from the Dead"

If you are participating in Outline October instead, now is your sign to start outlining and planning your story for Novella November!

If you don't have a concrete idea of who your main character is yet, now is the time to start brainstorming and designing :)

A good first step for outlining is figuring out what you want the opening pages of your story to be, how you want the main plot to start, and what happens between those two points, and work your way outward from there :)

current mantra

Tiny Tip #2

So, you've decided to take up creative writing! You open up your preferred writing program and go to open up your last file, which is your 20,000 word first draft of a novel-- until, uh oh! An error message pops up, saying the file is corrupted, can't be retrieved, etc!

Or, say lightning strikes your house, and fries your computer--!

Or, a cat comes scampering across your computer desk, sending your computer crashing to the floor where it promptly explodes in a million prices --!

How to you avoid losing all your hard work in these scenarios?

✨By Backing up your work regularly✨

You should take steps right now with any important documents you have on your computer!

Here's some very simple ways you can back your work up, from completely free to paid services:

Each day that you make changes to your main writing document(s), make a brand new copy with the "Save-as" function, and label each one with that day's date, so you have a complete timeline of documents from day one to current day, instead of all being one single document.

Email the Docx / ODF file to yourself once a day, and if you have more than one email, or a trusted friend/family member, email it to them as well in case you somehow lose access to your account.

use Google Docs to back up your documents or for cross-platform writing, or if you use Google Docs as your main writing program, back up your writing locally to Libreoffice and all other methods mentioned above. It only takes 1 issue with logging into your account or a service outage to lose access to your work on google docs!

Use 4thewords as another online cloud service to back up your writing and write cross platform

Use A cloud drive service to back up your works once a day, such as Google Drive, Mega, One Drive, IDrive, Sync Drive, etc to back up your works once a day

Use Calibre to convert your document into an ebook format or PDF, and send it to your phone as an extra backup, and a handy way to reference your writing on the go.

use Google Docs to back up your documents or for cross-platform writing, or if you use Google Docs as your main writing program, back up your writing locally to Libreoffice and all other methods mentioned above. It only takes 1 issue with logging into your account or a service outage to lose access to your work on google docs!

I *think* my computer is working again so tomorrow I'll post the new countdown in the morning.

Only 2-ish days til Ominous/Outline October!