NaNoEdMo
Cool mac link of the day: Perversion Tracker reviews the really bad Mac software that never sees the light of day on VersionTracker.
Just when you thought it was safe to go back to writing…the email appears in your box. You thought everyone had forgotten the 50,000 words of dreck you wrote in November, didn’t you? The lazy days, the desperate weekend catch-up sessions, the wretched last 2,000 words you wrote on the night of the 30th when you discovered that your word counter and NaNoWriMo’s didn’t agree…yes, they’ve all come back to haunt you. It’s time for NaNoEdMo - it’s time to edit that albatross into a sleek, fashionable penguin (paying special attention to the repulsive imagery of chapter four).
Don’t think you’ll get away just because didn’t finish your NaNoNovel, or even worse, didn’t start. According to the EdMo FAQ, any pre-existing draft of a novel qualifies for a national edit. Even fan-fiction is allowed. All you need is 50,000 words of dreck, more or less, and 50 hours of your time in March. Start planning now with the Pre-EdMo Tips. Check out Holly Lisle’s article on one-pass manuscript revision to make your first NaNoEdMo your last.
This comes at a bad time for me. After the exhaustion of NaNoWriMo, I took December off, then did some last-minute Trek writing in January for the ASC Awards year deadline. This month I’ve been on vacation from fanfic, slowly working myself up for more original fic. I have a stack of books on metallurgy I’ve been reading for one short story (which was supposed to be about genetics, not alloys) - I was so into The Nature of Metals by Bruce A. Rogers (1964) that I almost missed my T stop tonight. I certainly don’t want to stop writing both that story and the other I started this month in order to go back and edit dreck, but I’ll never get anywhere by starting novels. At some point, you have to finish them.
There goes another month…