NaNoWriMo

If you're not a writer, you may not be aware that this month is National Novel Writing Month, which is atrociously abbreviated as NaNoWriMo. (I know. I thought engineers and government employees were the only ones responsible for awful acronyms, but apparently writers are too). The points of NaNoWriMo is to write the first draft of a 50,000 word novel in a month.

I would love to be able to participate, to give myself a hard deadline of finishing a novel by the end of this month. Unfortunately, I have to be writing something very different this month. For me, this will be Mandy's Coarse Attitude Determination and Control Writing Month (MaCoAtDeCoWriMo?).

This month I must (I MUST!) write the Matlab code for the coarse attitude determination (which is a Kalman Filter) and the control law (I'm thinking a Linear Quadratic Regulator, LQR for short). I have to get this done, because all of our documentation for our design project is due two days after Christmas, and our final presentation is in January.

So if on occasion I forget to post this month (which I hope I won't), it's because I'm crying in front of my computer, debugging code, trying to understand why my control law doesn't work.

It's going to be a tough month.

An the writing front, I've thought of a new MG story, and it's actually a contemporary MG story. I know, I'm shocked too. Who knows if it will actually get written. I think I'm just going to use it as my stress relief in classes, to write a little when I zone out. I am unsure if it will come to anything, but a little writing will help relieve the stress of this month.

I'll keep you guys updated and posted as to how my research is going, and how my stress relief story is going.

Anyone out there participating in NaNoWriMo? Anyone have any particular goal for this month (like writing a Kalman Filter)?