August 2007

Maureen Johnson has an excellent blog post up called How To Revise A Book. I can so identify!

I’m delighted to announce that I’m going to be doing cartoons for NaNoWriMo again this year. “NaNoWriMo,” for those of you who don’t know, stands for “National Novel Writing Month,” which is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.

This year, I’ll also be doing some cartoons specifically for young writers as well. Like last year, some cartoons will be revamped from Inkygirl while others will be created specifically for the event.

The novel that I recently sent out began as a NaNoWriMo novel. I’ve promised Chris Baty that I’d let him know when it gets published.

As I mentioned before, I found Scrivener very handy in my novel rewrite, especially the corkboard feature. Right now I’m going through the tutorial again to become better acquainted with the other useful features, as well as browsing some of the posts in the forum.

Fascinating to see that some writers not only outline and research in Scrivener, but also write their entire novels, screenplays and theses inside Scrivener, only exporting to a MS-Word or PDF format just before printing.

Mac users who write should definitely take a look at this software. There’s a 30-day free trial version, after which you can buy a license for $34.99 if you like it. I plan to use Scrivener for my next novel. If you’re not a Mac user (or even if you are), the software author has also listed some competing software.

You can see more at the Scrivener Web site.

I’ve always loved this song, but didn’t realize there was a video until I saw it in Booklust:

Not the greatest quality video, but the song is fun. Micro-trivia: one of my uncle’s nieces is married to Mike Ford, one of the band members.

Click image above for a bigger version.