I’m tracking my writing again like the nerd I am

First it was camp, now it’s…

(Hang tight for info below on how to gently hack your current Scrivener project to make it automagically update NaNoWriMo for you!)

National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. I won Camp NaNoWriMo this summer by finishing goals on Watching the Detectives and the horror novel

Robert Ford

and I have started. I want to finish Watching, and Bob and I are going to finally start work in earnest after he meets his next deadline here in a few days, and we finally have our planned get together. Much goofing around, many horror movies and disturbing documentaries, so many words.

Buddy up with me here: nanowrimo/carlaclara

Current word counts as of today:

our horror novel: 17,424

Watching the Detectives: 55,314

Are you, like I am, using an existing Scrivener project? This is how you fix your project to automagically update NaNoWriMo as it tracks your daily progress—

For Mac (Windows at the link above):

1. Set up your NaNoWriMo project first.

2. Make sure your writing project is closed in Scrivener. If it’s open, you’re going to have to do this all over again. Also, you might mess up your saved writing.

3. Now find where you have stored that project’s file on your hard drive, Dropbox, Box, etc. Ctrl-click on the .scriv file and select "Show Package Contents".

4. Locate the file with a .scrivx file extension. It will usually has the same name as the .scriv folder. So YourNovel will be YourNovel.scrivx inside the package.

5. Open this .scrivx file in a plain text editor, not Pages, not Scrivener. BBEdit or TextEditor are good. Make sure smart quotes are turned off in the preferences of this text editor.

6. The first line or so will look like <Scrivener Project ...>. Add NaNo="Yes”.

7. Added by me: If your goal is more or less than 50,000 words (for example, if you are completing or editing a project), search for “50000” and replace it with your goal, with no delineators, all numbers. (To change your daily target, do the same thing with “1000”.)

8. Save and close the file. When you reopen the project in Scrivener, go to Projects>Show Project Targets. The new numbers should be correct.

   

   At the bottom of the Projects menu, you should now see “Update NaNoWriMo Count” as the final option. Congrats, you just coded. :) Your project will update its local stats automatically as it always has; just hit that “Update NaNoWriMo Count” menu choice whenever you are ready to do so; the first time you do, you will be prompted to log in to nanowrimo.org, and then you are off to the races.