m. c. de marco: To invent new life and new civilizations...

Another year, another NaNo: this was my eleventh National Novel Writing Month, and my eleventh victory. As I mentioned last time, I took a couple of years off in the middle, so I’ve been NaNoing a long, long time.

The NaNoWriMo forums continued to be only minimally distracting this year, I think because of the strict regulation of threads. The entire month of Scrivener discussion was crammed into one infinitely long thread that encompassed praise, blame, raw incompetence (as well as cooked), and the annual last-minute Scrivener-miscounted-my-words emergency.

So for cat-vacuuming distraction, I instead made a few adjustments to the fantasy family tree generator from last year (as mentioned in my last post), as well as to my (unpublished) conlang dictionary—a piece of software I started working on earlier this year. I’ve always wanted a good way to maintain a dictionary for a conlang, and I’d like to give it away someday, but for the moment it is rather user-unfriendly and somewhat hard-coded to my current conlang (and conscript).

There was also a novel involved. As has been my pattern lately, I had a vague outline for a fantasy novel which was very much fleshed out by the process of writing, but which I still only got about half-way through. Some year I should make a greater effort to write a novella that will be all wrapped up with a bow by the fifty-thousandth word. This was not that year.