m. c. de marco

In preparation for the upcoming month of procrastination and cat-vacuuming, I skimmed through my favorite NaNoWriMo forum last night, NaNo Technology, and found the usual topics—including how to make a map for your fantasy novel on your Mac.

My shortest story yet was published today at Thaumatrope, an sf/f/h twitter fiction magazine. I dimly recall submitting it, apparently in response to a call for steampunk and/or holiday stories, but I figured Bad Elf had killed little Timmy and buried his body in the slush pile.

To submit your own 140 characters of immortal speculative prose, all you need is a twitter account.

I took December 1st off, but according to Alexandra Sokoloff, I don’t deserve a break from my novel until it’s actually finished. I repented yesterday and went back to my novel, and also redeemed my 50% off coupon for Scrivener.

I’m not sure I’ll be doing any of the other things suggested on my I Wrote a Novel, Now What? page.

Here’s a link I didn’t get a chance to post during the NaNoWriMo madness: Scott Westerfeld’s tip on using Scrivener for pace charts:

Now, you may ask, what in the world is a pace chart? Basically, it’s any method you use to track the ups and downs of momentum in your book, the shifts from action to conversation to tension. Like all meta-docs, a pace chart allows you to step back from the trees of your text and see the forest.

Jessie has a far more detailed explanation of both Scrivener and phase outlining than mine.

Via HTLit: Merlin Mann advises against reading all that helpful plot advice I read yesterday.

Reading it all helped me, but Merlin has a good point about restricting the NaNo blog-hopping to outside your scheduled writing hours. Nothing helps me do that quite like Freedom, a virtual license to print words. And I can’t say I’ve yet figured out the Twitter hashtag #amwriting. When I’m tweeting, it’s because I #amnotwriting.

Via twitter: the new HTLit blog seems to be a handy clearinghouse for information about “literary hypertext.” It is itself on twitter; hypertext has always been a high-tech genre so nobody in the community is complaining about how pointless or incomprehensible twitter is.