Saturday 24 November 2007

Pic of the day: Why do "feminine days" not feature more heavily in magic fantasy novels? Because that's the first thing you'd use magic to avoid. (And if the women didn't, then the men surely would.)

Short: Back on track

Even though I still have an infection in my head, I have caught up with my NaNoWriMo word count. The murderous Arctic moose helped, and now I've crammed in half a chapter of basic sex-ed for farm boy heroes, bonus: why female characters don't menstruate in fantasy books.

I should have had vacation this month. Instead I have been working or on sick leave or both of the above, and I am still on track to get to 50,000 reasonably coherent words, barring divine intervention of the negative kind. I won't say that this proves that morphic fields are real (though there seems to be an ever increasing number of hobby novelists finishing ever earlier for each year). It could be simply that practice makes at least a little better, and a sum of other small factors such as text processors made specifically for NaNoWriMo. There are at least three fairly good such ones now: Q10, The Writer's Novel and yWriter. I use yWriter and frankly it is a great help. Its basic unit is the scene, and you can make empty chapters and scenes before you start or during the writing, then fill them out when you come up with the content. So if you got a vague idea but does not know the details yet, you can make a placeholder for it. And if you got a vivid scene but only know vaguely where in the book it is, you can still write it and then slot it in place later. That's a pretty good way to avoid writer's block. It is also technically excellent with a dictation-friendly RTF editor. And it would most likely never have been invented, or at least refined to its common form, without the NaNoWriMo. It is also free. Death to capitalism! Long live the freeconomy! It is the next stage in social evolution, and NaNoWriMo is its prophet.