A Local Habitation and a Name
I’m not taking NaNoEdMo as seriously as I took NaNoWriMo. There’s some debate over in the NaNoEdMo forums, about what exactly counts towards your fifty hours of editing. The strict interpretation says you should have pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, during your whole fifty hours. My interpretation includes random daydreaming about my story, or rereading it in the tub. (That’s how I consumed today’s 2 hours of editing.)
If I were being serious about it, I would have planned ahead according to the tips. I would be writing 50,000 more words to add to the current 50,000 and make my novel commercially viable, besides brushing up the scenes that are there. Instead I’m doing things vaguely related to the novel, like converting the encyclopedia I keep for my universe into XML.
I’m enjoying the rereading more than I expected. The novel gets a little rough at the end, when the deadline was pressing, but overall it’s better than I expected. It needs some subplot filler (as opposed to padding, which is bad filler) - not just to fill out the word count but to flesh out the main character, who’s really growing on me. He may be a homicidal maniac, but he’s my homicidal maniac.
During the other 22 hours of the day, I’ve been working on my encyclopedia. I wrote an XML DTD for it, as well as a CSS stylesheet for the XML. It’s gorgeous, if I do say so myself. I looked around for some cool fonts - the only one I downloaded was KelmscottRoman, but the sites were fun just to look through: Nick’s Fonts and apostrophic laboratories.
I used to keep all my info for my original stories in a TWiki running on my mac’s local webserver, but I found that too cumbersome to use. I prefer editing in emacs instead of browser windows, for one thing, and I wanted more control over the display of my encyclopedia. XML and CSS did enough for me, though it’s clunky in some ways.
The Encyclopedia DTD and stylesheet are available upon request. My email address is around here somewhere…