3crows

Comment Threads

• david.given commented on Swirling/writing (2): <em>shugyo</em>
  I can strongly recommend doing Nanowrimo as an exercise: National Novel Writing Month. You commit to writing a 50000 word novel in the month of November. That's about 1500-2000 words a day. Note that it's very much about quantity, not quality: it's okay to produce utter dreck, as long as you produce. It's training you to sit down for an hour to two hours a day, and type, dammit. Once you can keep that up for a month you know that you're capable of producing the requisite number of words, so then it's just a matter of increasing the quality....
• Karl Schroeder commented on Swirling/writing (2): <em>shugyo</em>
  This is interesting; I too use Openoffice, but with gray text on a black background, to differentiate it from Word, which I use for business, academic and technical writing, and where it's almost impossible to change the default colours. And, like Charlie, I banish all communications media while I write; although I do keep a browser open for quick searches should I need a name or geographical detail. On the other hand, I don't use Scrivener or its better PC equivalent, Liquid Story, because I don't work the way they do. Too elaborate, too fussy. I use OpenOffice because I...
• Charlie Stross commented on Swirling/writing (2): <em>shugyo</em>
  I am firmly of the opinion that if you write on a word processor and you need to write a second draft, then you have fucked up the novel. Word processors let us edit and fix problems as we work. When I'm in the swing of a book, I start each day by editing the previous day. If I did something wrong, I truncate that day's work and re-do; if not, I polish the prose then continue, seamlessly, having reminded myself of exactly where I've been. A finished first draft written front-to-end that way is therefore much more polished than...
• david.given commented on Swirling/writing (2): <em>shugyo</em>
  If people like the Silmarillion, they might be interested to look up Brian Stableford's The Days of Glory / In the Kingdom of the Beasts / Day of Wrath, an exceedingly weird future/mythological high space opera/parable thing which starts out as a retelling of the Illiad and the Odyssey and then gets weirder. Possibly a little hard to find these days, but you won't have read anything like it anywhere else......
• Moderator Alan commented on Swirling/writing (2): <em>shugyo</em>
  Though it's interesting to note that a number of early languages - including Greek - used to go both ways. Every time you got to the end of the line, you turned and started coming back again. In Greek, it slowly died out. It may be observed that many older documents are hard to read due to the lack of spaces between words. Part of the evolution of writing in the Western world has been the settling on a single direction for text, the insertion of spaces to make it more obvious where word boundaries are, consistent spelling, more sophisticated...