For those not in the know, NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month, where participants try to complete a 50,000 word manuscript in the space of the thirty days of November. I have participated in various years, sometimes seriously, sometimes casually. I like the idea of personal challenges — for years I’ve celebrated an informal season of the year from October-December where I try to complete some physical challenges in October, do NaNo the next month, and do Advent of Code in December.

One of my favorite aspects of NaNo is coming up with some mad scheme to be able to produce more writing output more easily. I’ve tried sticking to pen and paper, using a distraction free word processor (specifically an old AlphaSmart), and using various programs and apps that promise distraction-free writing.

This year, I set my sights on my trusty old Chromebook that I haven’t used much since upgrading my laptop. At various times I have experimented with using crouton to turn it into a combo Chromebook/Linux box (the new Chromebooks do this natively, of course, but this one is ancient). I usually would get spooked after a while because people feel crouton makes Chromebooks less secure, and at the time I was doing almost everything through the Google ecosystem.

But now I had a bit more flexibility, because I could just boot the Chromebook with one of my burner Gmail accounts and not worry about any of my personal data being exposed. This would give the advantage of being forced to use a Google account that is not linked to any of my social media logins, so I wouldn’t be able to access potential sources of distraction. So why not turn this Chromebook into the ideal distraction-free writing device for NaNo??

To do that, I installed Crouton CLI-only, and then used apt-get to acquire Emacs and Python. (Along the way I made my annual attempt to understand Vi and gave up as usual. Exit! Exit, you accursed thing!) CLI Emacs will be an ideal distraction-free writing device, and I’ll just compose in Markdwon, which I’m pretty accustomed to by now.

But wait! With the Chromebook in developer mode, I am only ever one false keystroke away from wiping the entire system on bootup and losing all my progress! That would be a major bummer, especially towards the end of November. So I created a Github account to go with my burner Gmail, and will use a private repo to save my progress as I go — if all goes well, it should still be possible to manage it all from the CLI.

The other thing I really wanted was some way to track my progress and see if I’m on track. To do that, I will write some simple Python scripts to count words and measure my progress against the deadline.

We will see how matters progress in a couple of days! My hope is that I will have a productive November. If all goes well, I might try a similar setup for cracking Advent of Code the month after.