Oct. 30th, 2008

Corridors

Oct. 30th, 2008 01:00 pm
jack: (Default)
I have a theory.[1] English people, when passing each other in a corridor, instinctively give way to the other person, which means moving to the wrong side of the corridor for their own progress, which means two people who ought to be walking along opposite sides of the corridor can end up both arcing round to the other side to let the other person past on their side. Or maybe it's just people I know :)

[1] Oh, you know what kind of eyes she's got.

Nanowrimo

Oct. 30th, 2008 11:57 pm
jack: (Default)
I've gone ahead and signed up to NaNoWriMo[1]. I don't expect to write a novel, nor 50k words, as I'm planning to devote what _spare_ time I can, rather than carving out some real time, but I would like to put some concentrated effort into writing 2-3 short stories, and think that's in the spirit of the exercise.

There's a nano forums Cambridge UK meetup tomorrow night in the Cambridge Blue, I hope to go along and say hi to other people

Last time I wrote anything, I adopted the practice of moving to a new file (saldini-001.rtf, saldini-002.rtf, etc) every day or so. That mostly worked, but does it make more sense to go ahead and use plain text and source control? Or to fixedly avoid ever changing anything until the end, and just have draft 1, draft 2? I assume their ought to be word processors that track edits in the same way, does anyone know if any are at all satisfactory? (I know word does something like that, but have difficulty believing it would be a positive experience for writing.)

Story #1. I think, take the lost world posts from LJ. They evolved into a consistent narrative, with interesting characters, but a lot of that was only in my head. With about as much material again, I think that would make a story. And I'd need to make sure the background is actually specified at some point in the story -- it drew into my father david mythology, but I never really wrote about that.

Story #2. Anthony Price (not really like John Le Care) meets Draco Tavern (one spacefaring race got there first, everyone else has to take passage with them, interstellar politics armwrestling behind the scenes. Funny, but about serious topics too.)

[1] I know most people I know have written NaNo at some point ages ago, and quite probably written more interesting stories than I do, but I still like to, because I really enjoy some of the stories I've written before. I've known some more-nearly professional writers, and been embarrassed to realise how far I would be from that, but I've also really enjoyed some of my stories, and think they do have some definite good in them.

[Ranting ahead] And I know most people have seized on the fixed idea that everyone who considers writing nanowrimo falsely believes (1) 50k words is a good length for a novel (2) it's useless to try write sustainably at the same level of quality, and only good to trade quality for quantity, and hence consider it a moral virtue to mock mercilessly anyone who ever writes non-professionally, especially during November. Hm, that sentence didn't end up where it started. I think I ran into people who ran into really really amateur writers...

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