It’s done. After a month of writing 1,667 words almost every day (with a few days hitting 3,000 to 4,000 to make up for traveling, family engagements, and the occasional bout of exhaustion), I completed my novel.

It’s 53,379 words, which is slightly over the 50,000-word goal set by the National Novel Writing Month organizers. It’s only a rough draft of course, and I’ll estimate it needs another 20,000 words or so to be complete, based on what others tell me, and on what I personally think needs to be added to round the book out properly.

After a few days of working with Open Office's word processor, it was time to turn to the spreadsheet. I don't work with spreadsheets much at home, but I do have a few specialized uses for them. One of those is a campaign manager for my Mutants & Masterminds campaign – I use it to track past, current and future events in the campaign. Each entry has a column for event name, date, weather, type of event (e.g. blog post, crime, super activity) and a brief description.

My first few days on NeoOffice haven't turned up any major problems, but I have encountered a couple of foibles. Most of these are personal preferences, but I think most heavy Word users while find them to be similarly annoying

Firing up NeoOffice and using it to write a few quick documents, the first thing I noticed was how slick and Aquafied it was -- it feels like a Mac OS X native application, which is a major advantage over Open-Office-under-X11 approach that I took earlier.

November is coming. And that means so is National Novel Writing Month. In years past, I've watched and read as my friends fought their way through it, some succeeding, some failing, all glorious in the pursuit. I've sat, thought, considered and ultimately come up with one excuse or another not to do it. There's always next year, I told myself, I don't have time for it now.

Now it's next year. And I'm going to do this.

Open Office is a free, open-source alternative to Microsoft Office. Based on Sun's Star Office, Open Office has been around for a number of years, and has proved fairly popular with the geeks, particularly those who dislike being beholden to Microsoft, Apple or any other proprietary software developer. It's the predominant office productivity suite on Linux, and comes bundled with distributions like Ubuntu.