m. c. de marco

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.

I had to make a slight change to the sffms2rtf beta tonight in order to submit a story in RTF. Apparently a change in PHP5 has made “\f” an escape sequence rather than just the plain RTF characters my program was assuming they were. This caused some excessive spacing and stray characters in the output, which should now be corrected.

Sffms is a LaTeX document class for typesetting fiction manuscripts.

Via I Should Be Writing: Rachel Greenham has a writeup on subversion for writers. I find rcs more than sufficient for my version control needs, but I suppose subversion could help other writers get in a few good hours of cat-vacuuming.

Word users need not apply.

I noticed the mis-take in a old Language Log post on hyphenization:

In any case, pro-ofreaders were clearly not obsolete then. Nor are they now. Though brute-force methods — really really big dictionaries with possible hyphenations specified — can improve things considerably, and undoubtedly have.

But I knew TeX had a famous (well, to TeX geeks) hyphenation algorithm that was rumored to never mishy-phenate.

Via Daring Fireball: Steven Poole says goodbye to Word.

Microsoft Word still uses the metaphor of the page, the computer screen that imitates a blank, bounded sheet of physical paper. For me, this is outdated and unimaginative. It has become a barrier rather than a window.