From the Lab: NaNoWriMo, here we come

You know, ever since we launched Ulysses, people were asking for writing goals. Like… not as in “give me a reason to write, I don’t know what I want to accomplish, if I want to be an author at all, if I want to create a novel, a screen play or just brainstorm all day long”, but in that good old trivial sense of “oh dear, your app makes me write so much with such an ease, I’m loosing track of time and my character limit”.

And we said: “Haha, dear user, we hear you, but why don’t you just write down your character limit someplace, and then check the character count and compare the two? A little math no harm doth, see?”

But the users answered: “We want progress! No, we mean… we want to check progress! No, wait, we want… aw, screw you, give me writing goals or give me death! That’s a deliberate twist of a Patrick Henry quote I pulled from a Frank Miller comic, by the way.”

And we said: “Whut?”

And so it went, for more than a decade. And many a moon passed over NaNoWriMo and its crazy 50.000 words minimum, with no harm doneth in a little math doneth. Writers wrote, and writers mathematized, and no goals, no deaths, no more Patrick Henry quotes.

But the seed… the seed was planted. And seeds grow after they can.

And so, without any further ado (but, quite frankly, only because I’ve almost reached my 1500 character limit), we hereby announce writing goals for Ulysses III 1.2 – and no, these are NOT “in the works”, but already done.

And I… I am done, too. See?