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"I have your secret. Can I give it away? HA HA HA"
Dec 30, 2011
Evil earrings
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"I have your secret. Can I give it away? HA HA HA"
Dec 27, 2011
I wrote a novel (more or less)
I wrote a novel for National Novel Writing Month.
The main tools I used on my computer were Scrivener, LeechBlock and SimplyNoise. The main things that helped offline were coffee*, a daily word-count requirement, and a few real and virtual writing buddies. The main things I avoided were how-to-write articles and editing as I went. The main thing I learned was that writing fiction, at least the first draft, can be a lot of fun. Also, people seem to be inordinately impressed that a person with nothing but time on her hands can string together 51,000 words in a month. I'm super impressed at anyone who did it while holding down a full-time job and/or feeding and cleaning up after other people. But me? I've got room.
I don't know if I'll do anything with the thing. It's about some foreigners in Japan, which -- hey, come back! The villain is a naturalized Japanese citizen of Canadian descent, and the heroine is a headstrong woman from the US who doesn't know (or care) a thing about Japan before she comes over in pursuit of a vague job. The company she and her fellow recruits work for turns out to be quite sinister. There's a friendly ex-yak and an unlicensed accupuncturist.
Anyway, it was fun. A lot of people I talked to said they'd been thinking of trying NaNoWriMo sometime. I had heard of it a long time ago and thought, There's something I'll never do! But then the day before it started this year I thought I'd give it a try, and the next day I thought I'd keep going for another day or so and here we are. I figured out the plot, such as it is, in the third week. It might want some revision.
*Everyone always says "Coffee! Ha ha!" and I felt compelled to include it, too, but more because I did a lot of writing in coffee shops than because I was staying up all hours alternating between pounding caffeine shots and tearing out my hair. I think we novelists** like to project the latter image, but, unusually for me, I did most of the work*** during daylight hours.
**Oh, please.
***It also feels silly to call it work in this case.
The main tools I used on my computer were Scrivener, LeechBlock and SimplyNoise. The main things that helped offline were coffee*, a daily word-count requirement, and a few real and virtual writing buddies. The main things I avoided were how-to-write articles and editing as I went. The main thing I learned was that writing fiction, at least the first draft, can be a lot of fun. Also, people seem to be inordinately impressed that a person with nothing but time on her hands can string together 51,000 words in a month. I'm super impressed at anyone who did it while holding down a full-time job and/or feeding and cleaning up after other people. But me? I've got room.
I don't know if I'll do anything with the thing. It's about some foreigners in Japan, which -- hey, come back! The villain is a naturalized Japanese citizen of Canadian descent, and the heroine is a headstrong woman from the US who doesn't know (or care) a thing about Japan before she comes over in pursuit of a vague job. The company she and her fellow recruits work for turns out to be quite sinister. There's a friendly ex-yak and an unlicensed accupuncturist.
Anyway, it was fun. A lot of people I talked to said they'd been thinking of trying NaNoWriMo sometime. I had heard of it a long time ago and thought, There's something I'll never do! But then the day before it started this year I thought I'd give it a try, and the next day I thought I'd keep going for another day or so and here we are. I figured out the plot, such as it is, in the third week. It might want some revision.
*Everyone always says "Coffee! Ha ha!" and I felt compelled to include it, too, but more because I did a lot of writing in coffee shops than because I was staying up all hours alternating between pounding caffeine shots and tearing out my hair. I think we novelists** like to project the latter image, but, unusually for me, I did most of the work*** during daylight hours.
**Oh, please.
***It also feels silly to call it work in this case.
Dec 25, 2011
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