NaNoWriMo 2017
Another year, another NaNo: this was my fourteenth National Novel Writing Month, and my fourteenth victory. (I took a two-year vacation a few years ago.)
The NaNoWriMo forums continue to suffer from strict regulation of threads. The entire month of Scrivener discussion was once again crammed into one infinitely long and not particularly informative thread, while any separate requests for information were immediately locked, with advice to ask in the Scrivener thread. I used Scrivener again this year, in combination with my gamebook project template, Scree.
I wrote earlier about getting started up this year on another hyperfiction story, still using Scree, Scrivener, and Twine. Once again it started out much easier than a linear novel, but about halfway in the overhead in complexity began to cut into my lead. I didn’t need to untangle too much, but I did try, not always successfully, to reunite the diverging threads of my plots. One major simplifying factor was the two-part structure of the novel, where if you survived the apocalypse, you got to participate in some brave new world thread which, despite not being a single bottleneck, turned out to be a sort of simplifying reset button regardless.
For cat-vacuuming distraction, I made several improvements to DotGraph, some of which I blogged along the way and some of which I still need to release, and started on a new format, PrePub for (eventually) converting my stories to ePub format. Early on in the month I even reviewed a few print hyperfiction books, before my word count dipped below on-schedule.
© 2017 M. C. DeMarco
≪ Previous | Next ≫
