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.

I finished my 50,000 words early this morning, having reached the midpoint of the novel by a route that was not quite the one indicated in my phase outline.

The NaNoWriMo Widgets are up!

11:20pm Perhaps the widgets have pushed the NaNo server over the edge. It’s been up and down all day.

I procrastinated on a NaNoWriMo forum desktop thread for a while last week, and here’s my favorite collection: Shattered By Rain’s NaNoWriMo 2009 Wallpaper.

That will be all, since I’m a few thousand words behind schedule.

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 @Scrivener: Alexandra Sokoloff’s blog is full of plot advice for NaNoWriMo taken from the silver screen. See especially her story elements checklist. I wish I’d known about her October Outline month back in October.

I decided to experiment with phase drafting by using the phase system to write a prologue for my NaNoWriMo novel. My outline was 180 words, with a target of 10 draft words per outline word. Altogether this would have been just one day’s writing on my usual NaNoWriMo schedule.

But it seems I did not have my phasing quite worked out, because I ended up with 3800 words—-and I don’t approve of prologues to start with. I will have to try again with Chapter 1 and see if I can cram more detail into my outline.