My First Fling With Dr. Wicked

Go! Goal set--200 words, 15 minutes. I am taking my first real stab at using Dr. Wicked's Write or Die site, and because I have no idea how fast I can or should write (or type, for that matter,) I thought that would be a valid first outing.

I first heard about Dr. Wicked on the NaNoWriMo site (yes, I'm obsessed, aren't you?) and thought I'd give him a go. The site allows you to set a timer and a writing goal, which my inner Luddite snottily smirks at. Did Isak Dinesen require a website with a timer? NO! And the only outside help Balzac had was the copious consumption of coffee, which I understand he drank all day and into the night, up to and past the point of madness. I can no longer avail myself of such chemical extremes, preferring to pop an extra vitamin B and swig some fish oil from the bottle instead. I like to sleep when I'm in bed, thank you very much. But anyway, I'm jabbering now not only to avoid punishment (I'll tell you about that in a minute) but also to drown out the annoying anti-nerd nerd in my head. No, Dinesen and Balzac and Asimov--

ooh, the celebratory horns just blew with 7 minutes, 47 seconds left to go. The horns are good, they mean to say I hit my word count. So that means I am capable of writing 100 words in 7 minutes. So that means if I can, wait, let me hit the calculator. So, if I'm doing my math right, that means I SHOULD be able to write that 50,000 word "novel" in 3500 minutes. which works out to be 58.33333333333333 hours. In a month. Piece of cake.

All of these calculations assume I can keep up the pace. My plan is just to freewrite for 58.33 hours spread carefully over a month. 1000 words every weekday morning before school. 3000 on Saturdays and 5000 on Sundays, taking off Thanksgiving and the day before.

But back to Dr. Wicked. If I had paused to think for a bit too long, the background on my screen would have turned pink (which it did at one point,) then red, and then a presumably obnoxious song would have started playing and continued until I began typing again. My setting right now is 'average', but if I went with the kamikaze setting, the punishment is much more severe-- the words would begin unwriting themselves until I resumed. How evil is that?

So, after one roll with Dr Wicked, I think I love him. And I'm sorry DH Lawrence didn't have a spell check, and Henry James could not avail himself of word count, but I live now and if I have to breath modern air, and be a weak ol' modern woman who will never know the joy of trimming her own quills or killing her own goose, I might as well enjoy my gadgets.