Well I didn’t start writing until pretty late today. I’m at the write in now. And I’m starting to get used to my new keyboard. l’m doing better with it that I thought I would. Based on reviews I hadn’t expected to get much beyond 30 words or so on the first day. But we’ve done two 15 minute word wars, and both my scores were just a smidge under 600, which makes for a very pleasing +/- 40wpm.

The total for the day isn’t too huge, but 2200 is still a nice score and I didn’t put in a whole lot of writing time all things considered. In fact after doing 54k over the last 7 days I rather needed a bit of time away from writing this morning. So I left it until we arrived here late in the afternoon. Having a good way to write on the PDA definitely makes write-ins more procuctive that either working on paper, or trying to get stuff into the PDA using graffiti.

Also this puts me within just 1,100 words of getting my (sort of) goal for the weekend: 125,521. I may have to revise that upwards to keep up production tomorrow. Doing wordwars in person is proving to be a great deal of fun. And while the chat can sometimes distract you from writing, it can also help work through problem areas more quickly. All in all write-ins with my new toy look like they’re going to be a success.

On the new toy front there were a couple of minor issues, largely due to the fact that the keyboard driver isn’t the only piece of new software I’ve put on the PDA yesterday and today. Fortunately I’ve got software that lets me back up the PDA’s internal memory onto the SD card I have in it. That made it some of the software in the latest updates didn’t seem to want to work with the keyboard after a few minutes. So I reverted to a slightly earlier configuration, which did have the keyboard drivers in it, and that’s been running pretty well for hours now. Still it’s a valuable lesson for this sort of operation, and also for NaNo itself: backup early, and often.