Team Plotters- Pacemaker NaNoWriMo Tournament Winners!

nano-winner-badge

In a spectacular tour de force, Team Plotters wrote their way to Pacemaker NaNoWrimo Tournament victory! Congratulations are in order for the 33 Plotters who won NaNoWriMo by hitting their 50k targets, and in many cases flying over them!! Your profiles will be pinned with a golden Novel badge!

Congrats are also in order for each member of Team Plotters! Every single one of your words contributed to the massive final word count of over 2 MILLION words! Each Team member, therefore,  will be pinned with the Plotter badge for being on the Team with the higher overall word count, and most NaNo winners!

Although your Team did not start out ahead, and despite continuously having fewer team members, you hit your stride around week 3, after which you were unstoppable! You really exemplified the old adage, it’s not how you start that matters, it’s how you finish! And boy did you finish strong!

Pacemaker NaNoWriMo Tournament Plotter Stats.png

Honourable mention is made to Team Pantsers which held the lead for quite a while but alas, could not sustain it to the end. You started out strong, consistently had more team members but, despite ending with impressive stats all around, couldn’t regain your lead over the Plotters. For your outstanding effort, each member of Team Pantsers will be pinned with the dark blue Pantser badge for participation!

Pacemaker NaNoWriMo Tournament Pantser Stats.png

I don’t know if you can tell but at Pacemaker, we LOVE Tournaments and Group Challenges! It’s such a splended way to get to know a particular writing community, and the energy and fraternity which erupt around challenges like NaNo are palpable and contagious! We want to thank each of our Tournament participants for giving us the opportunity to host this Challenge and to jog alongside you, encouraging you, as you ran this race! NaNoWriMo is over, but a new work has just begun! You’ve got a substantial amount of words towards a new project. Follow through, keep refining it and who knows, you could someday look back on NaNoWriMo 2016 and think to yourself, “That’s when I started writing the greatest story ever written!”

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Oh, and don’t forget! You can keep the NaNoWriMo spirit going by creating a Challenge group of your very own with a Pacemaker Challenges Subscription!

Pacemaker NaNoWriMo Tournament- Plotters vs Pantsers

We’re one week into NaNoWriMo and the Pacemaker NaNoWriMo Tournament!

Now, we could’ve been nice and created an Open Pacemaker Challenge Group where we encourage participants to compete only against themselves. INSTEAD, we decided to start a bit of a fire… and then fan the flame!

We’re pitting Plotters against Pantsers to see who’ll come out on top!

plotters-v-pantsers-1

Each member of the Team with the higher total word count at the end of NaNoWriMo gets a delightful new pin to proudly display on his/her profile.

( See what we did there? 🙂 )

Over the past seven days each Team has enjoyed a few moments in the top spot.

Surprisingly (at least to us) there have always been more Pantsers than Plotters BUT, the Plotters seem to be producing more words per person than the Pantsers on average. We have a sneaky suspicion that the Pantsers are playing a bit of a numbers game BUT only time will tell, it’s still very much anybody’s game!

SO! Are you a Plotter- meticulously planning out the details of your novel pre-NaNoWriMo so that you hit the ground running, map in hand, November 1st? Or are you a Pantser, literally flying into NaNoWriMo by the seat of your pants, no plan, just a wing and prayer?

Whichever way, there’s a place for you in the Pacemaker NaNoWriMo Tournament! There’s still plenty of time to join. Pick a side and make your word count, count!

 

 

Let’s walk through Creating a Pacemakerplan!

Many of you reading this would already be very familiar with the process of creating a Pacemakerplan. Our hope is that the process is so intuitive that anyone who arrives at pacemaker.press is able to easily jump right in and get started. For others, this will be your first visualization of the process from start to finish. Either way, you’re here now, so why not follow along with us below?  There’s really no substitute for a hands-on experience though. So once you’re through here, head over to the site and create your very own! We’ve also collected a repository of sample Pacemaker plans show casing the features of the site that we’re constantly updating. Have a look at those to get inspired.

Step 1: Enter Basic Plan Info (What am I doing?)

Give your plan a unique name and add some basic attributes.

Under ‘Activity’, specify the particular action you’re doing to create your content (writing, revising, translating etc.). Then under ‘Content’, select the final product you’re hoping to produce (dissertation, essay, thesis etc.).

Step 2: Set your Goals (Where am I going?)

Define the parameters of your writing plan.

It’s time to quantify your goal. Enter ‘Amount of Work’ and then select ‘How it’s measured’. You might be doing 50,000 words, or 200 hours, or 45 chapters! However your project is measured, here’s the place to make it known. After that’s done, select the time parameters of your project (start and end dates), and voilà, the first version of your Pacemakerplan appears!

 

Pro tip: You can also choose to display an Overall Target or a Daily Target. If you want to achieve your ‘Amount of Work’ daily select ‘Daily’ (you will still be able to choose days to skip writing if you wish). However, if your ‘Amount of Work’ is your overall target, as in the hypothetical project we’re creating here, leave it as is!

What about if you don’t know your deadline?

Sometimes you do not have a specific deadline in mind but instead, you have an idea of how much work you’d like to get done each day. In this case, turn off the “fixed deadline” setting and specify how much work you’d like to do. Pacemaker will then automatically calculate the deadline for you given your specified pace. Note that when you choose daily goals or un-fixed deadlines, some of the strategy options below won’t apply.

No Fixed Deadline

Step 3: Define your strategy (How the heck am I getting there?!)

So you know where you’re going to start, and you know where you’re going to finish, but how in the world are you planning on getting there?! Well, just like a GPS allows you to plot a course from point A to point B, while maybe avoiding toll roads, and optimizing for the fastest route, Pacemaker offers you many ways to get to your goal.

Right now we have 7 Strategy Presets from which you can choose: Steadily, Rising to the Challenge, Biting the Bullet, Mountain Hike, Valley, Oscillating and Random. You’ll find these along with clear descriptions on how they affect your plan right there in the Strategy box.

Here’s an example of the plan we’re creating here using all 7 presets:

You may also choose an intensity for your plan which changes how aggressively a particular strategy is applied. For example, on the ‘gentle’ setting, you won’t see too much variation in your word count targets using most strategies. However, with ‘hard core’, daily goal targets will change more drastically day to day.

For our purposes, let’s go with an average intensity, Oscillating preset, because let’s face it, Oscillating creates the most visually mesmerizing graphs!

Step 4: Customizations (Should I stop to see anything along the way, you know, take in the sights?)

On a road trip from Point A to Point B, after you’ve planned your route, you may decide to do a bit of sightseeing. You may opt to linger a bit longer here or there, or decide to bypass some places altogether.

The Customizations panel in Pacemaker allows you to do something similar. Here you can choose to write more or less on some days, or skip some days altogether (say write more every Tuesday and skip Thursdays or skip whole weeks at a time). You can also reserve a few days at the end of your project for editing, revision etc.  you know, just in case.

For our example, let’s skip weekends and ‘Do More’ on Mondays because, why not? Aaand let’s not reserve any buffer days at the end because, well, we’re just fly like that. Here it is:

Step 5: Display (What kind of map do I want on my journey?)

Choose how you’d like to see your plan displayed: Calendar, Graph or Table. For the commitment-phobes, don’t worry, you can change the display as often as you’d like, you won’t be ‘locked in’ to one display indefinitely.

You know the drill, same plan, 3 ways:

Paid users also have access to a bar chart view.

 

Step 6: Progress (How do I stay on track to finish on time?)

Do you want your plan to adjust based on your progress or do you always want to see how you’re performing in relation to your original plan? Let’s say you write 1000 words on day 1, instead of the 600 your plan prescribed, do you want your plan to automatically recalculate your plan in light of this surplus, or do you want it to stay the same so you can see on your graph that you surpassed your day’s goal?

You’ll also have the opportunity to select how you want to input your progress. You can choose to either record how far you’ve reached each day, or you could record the exact quantity you completed each day. I suppose it just depends on how much math you feel like doing :).

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So there you have it! In a few quick steps, you have your very own Pacemakerplan! We’ve tried to make the process as easy and intuitive as possible, but we’re always looking for opportunities to make the process even more so. So if you think of a way we can streamline it even further, we’d love to hear about it!

Finally, we’ve collected a repository of sample Pacemaker plans show casing the features of the site that we’re constantly updating. Have a look at those to get inspired.

Happy writing everyone, and thanks for using Pacemaker!