Still NaNo-ing, woot!
Nov. 20th, 2014 08:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenayPapercuts, my NaNo novel, is still on track and I still don't hate it. Woot!
(Usually I have a stage in a project where I hate my words and swear blind it's the worst thing I've written. I'm still waiting for that moment to hit with this.)
The interesting part about doing it as a NaNo novel is that we're encouraged not to go back and edit, and definitely not to go back and delete stuff. After all, it's the total word count that matters, so removing parts is going to put us behind. That doesn't mean I can't go back and add things, which I had to do last night when I realised that I'd missed out a key bit of information that needed to be passed from one character to another in a scene. Oops.
But that same scene includes some fairly hefty and unnecessary exposition, because it got away from me, and I know a lot of it will be getting cut during revisions. Normally, I'd already have thrown it out (and possibly regretted it later). For NaNo, I'm just highlighting it and leaving myself a comment that it's a section I need to trim down.
Who knows, I may need that information later. So at least I haven't junked it. When I make big cuts in revisions, I'm usually pretty careful about saving the words somewhere else in case I need them or can reuse them somehow. One of my bad habits is being less careful with mid-novel-in-progress revisions, so maybe the NaNo process is going to help me with that.
At some point, I need to do a post about Scrivener, which I'm using to actually write the novel for the first time. I've been using it to organise projects for a while, but still writing in Word. This time I've done the whole thing in Scrivener and I'm starting to understand why so many people love it.
I had this vague idea that I'd have time to edit and post a couple of fics that I've been sitting on for a few weeks. Um, no, this ain't gonna happen. I think they may end up being my Christmas present fics at this rate! All my December words will be going to finish Papercuts and write my Yuletide fics, so maybe it's wise to save those fics for, er, even longer than planned and throw them up on Christmas Eve.
I can pretend that was totally the plan, right? It's not like they were actually intended to be published in October...
(Usually I have a stage in a project where I hate my words and swear blind it's the worst thing I've written. I'm still waiting for that moment to hit with this.)
The interesting part about doing it as a NaNo novel is that we're encouraged not to go back and edit, and definitely not to go back and delete stuff. After all, it's the total word count that matters, so removing parts is going to put us behind. That doesn't mean I can't go back and add things, which I had to do last night when I realised that I'd missed out a key bit of information that needed to be passed from one character to another in a scene. Oops.
But that same scene includes some fairly hefty and unnecessary exposition, because it got away from me, and I know a lot of it will be getting cut during revisions. Normally, I'd already have thrown it out (and possibly regretted it later). For NaNo, I'm just highlighting it and leaving myself a comment that it's a section I need to trim down.
Who knows, I may need that information later. So at least I haven't junked it. When I make big cuts in revisions, I'm usually pretty careful about saving the words somewhere else in case I need them or can reuse them somehow. One of my bad habits is being less careful with mid-novel-in-progress revisions, so maybe the NaNo process is going to help me with that.
At some point, I need to do a post about Scrivener, which I'm using to actually write the novel for the first time. I've been using it to organise projects for a while, but still writing in Word. This time I've done the whole thing in Scrivener and I'm starting to understand why so many people love it.
I had this vague idea that I'd have time to edit and post a couple of fics that I've been sitting on for a few weeks. Um, no, this ain't gonna happen. I think they may end up being my Christmas present fics at this rate! All my December words will be going to finish Papercuts and write my Yuletide fics, so maybe it's wise to save those fics for, er, even longer than planned and throw them up on Christmas Eve.
I can pretend that was totally the plan, right? It's not like they were actually intended to be published in October...
no subject
Date: 2014-11-20 01:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-11-20 02:22 pm (UTC)Or finding that place you *know* you mentioned something, but it's somewhere in 150 pages of text and argh. I have been converted to the Scrivener love for big projects, at least :-)
no subject
Date: 2014-11-20 03:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-11-20 03:46 pm (UTC)I've got several longer fics that I want to write next year, and I'm seriously considering using Scrivener for them. It's been a bit of a revelation writing this novel in it and finding out how easy certain things are.
I wonder if I can figure out a way to compile so things are AO3 ready, with all the odd bits of HTML (for italics, blockquotes, etc.) already in place...
no subject
Date: 2014-11-20 05:36 pm (UTC)I suppose you could just write your fic and then hand-code the html in there? I mean, html is fairly easy.
no subject
Date: 2014-11-20 07:32 pm (UTC)